LessonStack

Lesson Timing

With Atomic Teaching, lesson timing is also made much clearer. On LessonStack when you add an activity to a stack you can assign it an amount of time you plan to spend on it. This means you can clearly see exactly how much time will be given to each Objective - something that is much harder to see clearly on a traditional lesson plan.

When you have a group of activities together in a Stack, LessonStack automatically presents them back to you as a checkable timeline to work to, so you can check off your teaching as you go.

This visual plan makes your lesson plan useful during the lesson. At LessonStack we believe that a lesson plan should play an active role in keeping you on track, playing the part of an extra teaching assistant. When the lesson plan works for you, it frees your brain up to focus on teaching. That’s why on LessonStack a lesson plan looks like this on a desktop:

Figure 3: Example Lesson Stack on Desktop

And like this on a mobile device:

Figure 4: Example Lesson Stack on Mobile

LessonStacks can be easily re-ordered by dragging the six dots located on the left hand side of each activity. The activities can be marked as completed by tapping the clock, and should you need a reminder of what to do on the activity, the full detail is displayed if you click on the title of the activity.

A quick glance at a LessonStack during your class gives you complete clarity of where and when you are, allowing you to make good decisions about how to manage your time.

When Timing Goes Wrong.

It can be difficult for a teacher to predict how many students are going to attend, what mood they will be in, how quickly they will grasp the activities set for them and so on. Given this amount of variability, it’s common for lesson timings to require updating during the lesson. On LessonStack, the timeline gives you instant clear feedback on how much material you have covered and how much there is left to cover, allowing you to make judgment calls on the fly.

If an activity is taking longer than you expected, you may decide that it’s important the students stick with it and spend extra time on it. Conversely, you may decide the next activity is more important, so moving on is the better option. Remember with LessonStack, that atom of teaching is completely portable, meaning if it wasn’t completed in the lesson, you can easily take that planning, and add it onto the next one: With LessonStack none of your planning is ever lost.

LessonStack cannot tell you which activities are important, but it can give you the information you need to make the critical decisions, at the exact time you need it.