Bringing Activities Together: The LessonStack
So far we’ve looked at planning single instances of teaching, but what about planning a whole lesson?
On LessonStack creating the atoms of your teaching is the hard part - putting them together in a lesson plan is quick and easy.
When you plan a lesson on LessonStack, you’re moving complete instances of teaching around which makes the process of composing a lesson extremely fast. You can drag and drop atoms of teaching onto any of your stacks, re-order or remove them in the blink of an eye. What's more, you can compose your lesson confident that the Activities you are moving around are complete instances of teaching with an Objective, Activity and Learning Assessment.
Contrast this to a traditional lesson plan; In a traditional lesson plan, objectives are usually written at the top, a collection of activities in the middle and perhaps some delivery notes and checks for understanding at the bottom.
When the parts of the teaching instances are separated and spread out like this, the individual instances of teaching become blurred. To push the atomic metaphor to its limit, we might say the atoms are split. The traditional lesson plan is one large document, and as such it's teaching contents must be balanced by the teacher. This balancing act is straightforward initially, but changing one part has a knock on effect. Changing an Activity may now mean your Objectives are out of sync so they’ll need to change too. You’ll also need to look at your checks and delivery notes to see if they still make sense. When you’re using LessonStack the entire act of teaching is bundled, meaning you can confidently add and remove teaching without worrying about going through your entire lesson plan to figure out if your objectives still match your activities.
What’s more, every activity you create on LessonStack is inherently reusable. You can easily add your Activities between stacks, without having to pick apart the bits you need from your old lesson plans. This is especially useful for Activities that used multiple times.
Consider our Art teacher adding the Warm-up Sketches Activity to the lesson plan. Over time this Activity may be added to many different lessons. Each time the teacher may notice more success with certain warm-up techniques than others. They may find better ways to organise the class and have everyone ready. Each time they notice a small improvement, they can make a small update to the Activity there and then. In Atomic Teaching these small refinements add up, resulting in an accumulating improvements over time. In this way, a teacher is able to leverage their practical teaching experience.
LessonStack is built in such a way that growing an Activity from initial idea to mature teaching interaction is easy. By making that process simple and shareable, the potential exists for teachers across the world to create a huge library of mature teaching interactions, that are continually being refined and road tested in the classroom.
Traditional lesson plans are not so easy to refine and share over time, and they also leave a lot of room for bad habits. It is very easy on a traditional lesson plan to end up with incomplete teaching material. Consider how easy it is when revising a lesson plan to accidentally include an objective that is not met, or an activity that does not meet any of the lesson’s objectives.
This is because a traditional lesson plan expects the teacher to keep track of which parts relate to each other. Atomic Teaching with LessonStack is the other way around: LessonStack tracks the relationships between Objectives, Activities and Learning Assessments for you, making it almost impossible to accidentally create incomplete material.
Figure 2: traditional lesson plan structure vs. an Atomic Teaching structure.
Notice in the traditional lesson plan it is possible to have different numbers of activities, objectives and checks for proficiency; meaning it is likely that some teaching actions are incomplete. With Atomic Teaching, the objective, the activity and the check for proficiency are bundled together for complete clarity. Notice also that as they are together, when you move one, you move the entire act of teaching, leaving the rest of the lesson plan intact.
On LessonStack we take the view that the potential for incomplete teaching interactions is an unnecessary by-product of the traditional lesson plan. On LessonStack the Objectives, Activity and Learning Assessment are all in aligned. Moving an Activity and all of its associated parts move together. It is much harder to get into a mess when composing a LessonStack.
That clarity is a powerful tool that eliminates the potential for grey areas and makes composing and refining a lesson plan a much easier process.
