Atomic Teaching

A Teaching Methodology for the Digital Age

Introduction

This guide introduces the concept of Atomic Teaching, a teaching methodology that centres around creating clear, shareable teaching resources. Central to Atomic Teaching methodology is the idea that when you work in small, complete chunks of teaching, it’s easier to share, plan and refine your work.

This text also serves as an introduction to https://lessonstack.net. LessonStack is a website built with the single goal of helping teachers plan great lessons using the Atomic Teaching method. Everything that you need to begin Atomic Teaching today can be found on LessonStack.net, and best of all, it’s free.

What is Atomic Teaching?

In Atomic Teaching we start with the premise that a single act of teaching comprises parts:

1. A purposeful objective

2. An activity that will be undertaken by the student

3. A check for learning by the teacher

When these three actions come together you have a single, indivisible, act of teaching. In the Atomic Teaching method, if any of these three actions are removed, then what is left can no longer be considered an act of teaching. This is how one 'atom' of teaching is defined.

If you are already a teacher, these concepts will be very familiar. The goal of Atomic Teaching is not to change the fundamentals of teaching, it is to use current technology to leverage and supercharge what you already know.

Let’s take a look at the parts of an Atomic Teaching interaction in a bit more detail...

An Objective

The first job a teacher has is to decide what is worth teaching. They can make this decision in any number of ways, but ultimately, the responsibility of deciding what should be learned is theirs. In Atomic Teaching, an objective is the simplest statement that describes what the student will learn. Here are some examples:

● Students will learn how to spell a collection of Year 4 level words

● Players will learn how to perform a tennis serve

● Chefs will learn how to bake a victoria sponge

● Students will learn how to solve long division problems

A good objective is succinct and to the point. A bystander should be able to read the objective and understand exactly what it means. In Atomic Teaching it is expected that you may scan through objectives when looking through activities to go on a lesson plan, so keeping them simple and readable is essential.

An Activity

After the teacher has decided what the students will learn, they will devise an activity that the student will undertake to learn it.

Broadly speaking, Activities fall into two categories: skill learning and knowledge learning. Skill learning is concerned with physical tasks, like perfecting a tennis serve, driving a car or drawing a beautiful picture. When teaching skill based learning, the proficiency check must include students actively demonstrating the skill in hand.

Knowledge learning consists of imparting intellectual understanding, for example how to solve long division or understanding the historical context of Picasso’s Guernica. Checking a students knowledge will often include written or spoken activities.

There are no restrictions on creating activities; they can be long or short, minutes or hours, creative or repetitive - as long as performing the activity will teach the students what they need to know.

But how will the teacher know if the activity has been taught?

A Learning Assessment

John Wooden famously said: “you haven’t taught until they’ve learned” - but how will you know students have learned? In Atomic Teaching, the Learning Assessment is where the teacher will check that learning has taken place. There are many ways to assess learning, but they fall into two broad categories: ‘fast’ and ‘thorough’.

An example of a fast Learning Assessment is when the teacher takes a temperature check of the room. Imagine you have taught something and you need to know if students have taken it on board, you might ask three students a probing question. This is not a thorough check, but it is fast and it will give you a heads up as to whether or not some learning has happened.

A thorough Learning Assessment will provide an in-depth check of every student. Examples include a test, written piece or case study. These checks are very thorough, however they are also time consuming, and often take up an entire block of learning time, so there can be limitations on how often they can be used.

Often, fast checks are necessary before a thorough check. As a teacher it is preferable to feel confident that learning has taken place before issuing a thorough check. There are exceptions to this though, for example there may be times when a thorough check is used as an initial assessment of student ability.

Every Activity you create will require some kind of Learning Assessment - however it does not always need to be thorough. Consider an art tutor who wants students to complete a series of warm up drawings before making a full study. In this instance the teacher must feel confident that students are warm and ready to begin, however it is likely not necessary to complete an in-depth Learning Assessment of this activity. In this case the teacher might simply check that the students have completed five drawings by simply walking around the room.

When students begin the main Activity of a detailed study, the teacher may wish to make a more thorough Learning Assessment, which might include 1 to 1 feedback during the session, group critiques and finally, adding the finished studies to the students portfolio as part of their graded course work.

There is no hard fast rule for how to write a check for learning, but there is a North Star question teachers should ask themselves when writing and refining them: How can I make my checks more thorough?

This question does not have a fixed answer, rather it gives a direction to the thought process of refining your checks over time. For example, say you have a check that will be a set of questions you ask the class directly after a short presentation, how will you ensure those questions are thorough enough?

Temperature Checking

Temperature checking is a fast Learning Assessment, delivered in such a way that the teacher can get a level of confidence for how much learning has happened in a large class size.

There are a few guidelines for temperature checking:

Be in control of who answers questions

Ask challenging questions

When temperature checking a room, the teacher needs to feel confident that learning has taken place across the whole class. Asking for hands in the air can be problematic because it requires the class to self-select who will answer the question. Directly asking students of your own choosing ensures a more rigorous check of learning. As a teacher, it is better to find out that learning isn’t happening early so you can adapt, and it’s much easier to do so if you are in control of who answers the questions.

Students should also feel that they may be asked a question at any moment. This can sound tough - many students don’t like to answer questions in front of the class. But, fostering an atmosphere where mistakes are encouraged is part of the teachers job, and it is also demonstrates clearly that the teacher is invested in everyone’s learning without exception.

When temperature checking it is essential that the student is required to demonstrate proficiency. Directly asking a student “do you understand?” will not give you confidence that learning has taken place. Here are some example questions that would enable the students to demonstrate proficiency:

● Josh what painting style did Seurat use in Bathers at Asnieres?

● Amy tell me why we keep a neutral spine when sprinting?

● Ahmed why did we remove the egg yolks in this recipe?

When composing a lesson plan, it is not necessary to perform a thorough check of every activity, however, part of composing the lesson plan is understanding where and when fast and through Learning Assessments are used, and for the teacher to use each appropriately.

For an in-depth look at temperature checking, I highly recommend the section on Cold Call in Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion.

Wooden Corrections:

In Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code special mention is made of the Wooden Correction. A Wooden Correction is the fastest, most effective way of making a correction that I have found; and I use it frequently in my coaching. A Wooden Correction goes like this:

Demonstrate the correct way

Demonstrate the mistake that was just made

Demonstrate the correct way again

If you find in your temperature checking that common mistakes are occuring, a Wooden Correction will often be a fast clear way to set students back on the right path.

Activity Example: Introducing Guernica

Having discussed the nature of Activities, let’s look at a specific example: Introducing Guernica. This activity is a knowledge based learning activity, that introduces an evocative painting by Picasso, and takes students on a guided journey of the work’s visual language.

Introducing Guernica

Objective:

Students will understand the visual language and historical context of Picasso’s Guernica

Activity:

Guernica is a highly evocative painting. In this activity, students will work to decode the visual language and historical context.

The teacher will show Picasso’s Guernica on the projector.

In this activity, instead of lecturing the class directly, the class will uncover the meaning of the painting by answering a series of questions directed to them by the teacher.

The teacher should guide students to the answers, without doing the thinking for them.

The following questions should directed at the class:

Q. This painting was made in 1937, how advanced do you think photography was then?

A. Must mention black and white, can prompt this answer if necessary

Q: Why would Picasso paint this in black and white?

A: Must make the link between painting and b+w photography as news documentation, can prompt this with ‘what other kinds of images are in black and white?

Q: How many men, women and children are present?

A: must realise that this is a civilian population as opposed to a military one

Q: Describe the emotional content of this work?

A: student must get to ‘horror’ or similar. Direct attention to the horse’s scream if they students are struggling.

Q: What is the woman on the left doing?

A Holding a baby

Q: What do we think has happened here?

A: We’re looking for ‘explosion’, or ‘terror attack’

Q: Where do we think this has happened?

A: use the bull and horse to make the connection with Spain)

At this point the students should have pieced together that this painting represents a terrible attack on a civilian population. However they may not know about the Spanish Civil war. The teacher may at this point spend 5-10 minutes filling in the historical blanks about the attack on Guernica

Learning Assessment:

Answering questions: the teacher should ensure that the questions in the activity are directed across the class. Do not ask for hands in the air - direct them to the students, and make sure they are spread across the whole class. Use the questions to judge the ability to interpret visual language in the room.

500 word summary: each student will complete a 500 word summary about the visual language and historical context of Picasso’s Guernica in there Art History sketchbook.

In Introducing Guernica, we see that the Activity and the Learning Assessment can work in tandem, and a classroom can move fluidly between the two. The students must pay attention and answer questions directed to them by the teacher. In so doing, they can give the teacher rapid feedback about their ability to read visual language.

Underneath each question is a specific point the students must get to. The teacher can guide the class to this point - but making the students do the mental work is key in this activity.

Deciphering Picasso’s work can be tough, but tough problems have potential for a sense of achievement. The teacher should not rush the activity by giving too much information to the students as doing so can deny the students the chance to feel the satisfaction of solving a difficult problem.

In this activity there are two Learning Assessments, a fast one (the teachers questions) and a thorough one (the written summary). Before the summary writing begins, the teacher should feel confident that every student in the room has gained the knowledge required to write the summary. This is accomplished by directing the questions across the whole class, for this reason we choose not to take hands in the air - but to direct where the questions will go.

If you like this activity and would like to use it in your lesson plans, you can find it at: https://lessonstack.net/activity/5b46c810-8a6b-443d-90c8-de323b56b069

Where to Find More Information on Proficiency Checking

In this text we have taken a very brief look at proficiency checking, but for an in-depth look at how to write great checks for learning, Doug Lemov’s book Teach Like a Champion is an excellent text, going to great lengths to track down teachers who have created highly effective checks for understanding. On LessonStack we use the term Check For Proficiency in place of check for understanding as a catch-all for both understanding and performative skills.

Creating Your First Atomic Activity!

Creating your first activity couldn’t be easier - just head over to LessonStack, login and go to the Activities page: https://lessonstack.net/activities

At the top of the page in the blue bar you will see an input labelled ‘new activity’, enter the name of your activity and hit return or press the green cross, and a new activity will be created.

Once created, your activity will appear as a yellow card on your activities page. Clicking the activity will take you to the editing screen. By dragging the activity you can add it to stacks or teams. Please note: teams are only available on the pro plan.

Figure 1: Creating your first Activity

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.

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.

Timing Tip!

In Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion, 2 Minute Warning is a technique used to help preserve the flow of a lesson, and it works wonders when transitioning from one activity to another.

In 2 Minute Warning, students are given a 2 Minute warning that the activity is about to end. Without this warning, some students will often find themselves unready for the next activity and will ask for further time, whilst others are finished and impatient to start the next activity.

This can leave the teacher in the difficult position of deciding whether to carry on or stay put. If students are given a warning before the activities end, they can ready themselves to move on. 2 Minute Warning is a great way to keep everyone working to the same clock.

Creating Your First LessonStack

To create your first LessonStack, navigate to https://lessonstack.net/stacks and enter the name of your LessonStack into the ‘new stack’ input at the top of the page. Once you have created your stack, it will appear on the Stacks page. It will also appear on the side menu on the Activities page where you can drag and drop activities straight into your stack.

Figure 5: Creating a Lesson Stack

Lesson Pacing

Lesson pacing is linked to timing, but is not quite the same. Pacing links two concepts - how high is the work rate, and how frequently does it change?

A key advantage of LessonStack, is that it presents your lesson back to you as a timeline, which allows you to easily get a feel for the pacing of the lesson. How a lesson is paced depends greatly on the subject, but a great question for the teacher to ask of their students is: how can I maintain a challenging pace?

In Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, a case study of the famous coach John Wooden describes a room full of energy, with students just about keeping up with one task before being moved onto the next one. In this description, the coach is like a conductor, calm and in control while the work rate is sky high.

As a new teacher I found pacing tough. Of my many faults, the one that seems the most obvious in hindsight is that I often tried to do the work for the students. That is, instead of firing questions and problems at them, I would exhaustively research a subject before putting it together in a slide show, expecting them to make notes as I went.

That meant that the pace in the room depended on my work rate instead of the students. It also put pressure on me as a teacher to prepare large quantities of information I could deliver, before delivering it in a way that was engaging. The result of this was that I diligently worked hard doing the work that the students should have been doing.

The takeaway from this, is that where you apply your mental energy matters. Applying your energy to ensuring students are working on a tough problem, is a lot more effective than spending your energy solving a problem for them. This sounds obvious, but it’s an easy trap to fall into.

Having your whole lesson laid out in an easy to read timeline gives you a quick and easy way to read the flow of the lesson, and check exactly who is doing the work and when.

Series and Schemes of Work

Having created Activities and LessonStacks, you may need to organise your stacks into collections to teach over a period of time. Teachers commonly work to a Scheme of Work lasting perhaps a term or semester. We use the term 'Series' on LessonStack because there are many other reasons to create a Series, for example an induction course lasting a few weeks, or a coach designing a Series of pre-game preparation sessions.

Series on LessonStack can be re-ordered by dragging and dropping them. Optionally you can add a delivery date to the Stacks in your Series. If Stacks have a delivery date they will appear on your homepage dashboard a week in advance so you can check and make any adjustments ahead of time.

Figure 6: Dashboard with upcoming LessonStacks

When you add dates to the stacks in series you will be prompted about your upcoming lessons on the homepage, allowing you to check and update your stacks just before you teach them

Creating Your First Series

To create your first series, navigate to the Series page (https://lessonstack.net/series) and enter a name in the ‘New series’ box, then hit return or click the green plus icon.

Figure 7: Creating a Series

Once you have created a series, they will appear in the right hand menu on your stack page. To add a stack you can simply drag and drop a LessonStack onto the series.

The Atomic Community

So far, we’ve looked at how to organize and plan your own material using the Atomic Teaching method, but working in complete instances of teaching comes with another big advantage: It’s highly shareable. LessonStack makes the process of sharing easy in two main ways: the Teams page and the Discover page.

The Discover Page

To see the Discover page, navigate to LessonStack and click on the ‘Discover’ link (https://lessonstack.net/discover) in the main menu . Once on the Discover page you will see activities made by other teachers. From here you can browse, search and read a range of activities. If you find an activity that you like, you can either make a copy of it for yourself by clicking the copy button, or simply drag the activity straight onto one of your LessonStacks that will be listed in the menu.

If you find a teacher you like, you can click on their avatar and go their profile page to browse their activities.

Figure 8: The Discover Page, here you will find activities made by other teachers. Preview an activity by clicking on it, or visit the teacher’s profile by clicking on their avatar. If you find an activity you like you can make a copy, or drag it straight into one of your LessonStacks in the right hand menu.

Copying Activities

When you copy an activity created by another LessonStack user, a copy is added in your own Activity page that contains a reference to the original author. You can safely edit this copy to suit your own needs without affecting the original.

For activities to appear on the Discover page, they must satisfy a few basic criteria:

● They must be set to public by the author,

● They must have content in the Objective, Activity and Check For Proficiency fields.

This criteria is likely to change over time as LessonStack grows, details will be updated on the website.

Activities on this page will range from the tried and tested to the initial experiment. On LessonStack we believe it is important to see how other teachers work, including both mature teaching activities and experiments. Doing so shines a valuable light onto the planning process.

Teams

Teams are a great way to share teaching resources with teachers you are connected to, whether they teach the same subject or work in the same environment. What’s more, you can even share Stacks and Series in teams.

Teams are only available on LessonStack Pro, which at the time of writing costs £5.99 a month or £59.99 a year. If you have gone Pro you can create and join as many teams as you need, so if you teach a range of classes and subjects you can easily create a team for each one.

Figure 9: the Team homepage.

On the Team home page you will find activities contributed by other members of your team. All of the usual options are also available in the teams area, meaning as well as browsing, you can make copies of resources to keep and edit. You can even add an activity by simply dragging it from here into your own Stacks.

Going Pro!

Teams are unlocked by subscribing to LessonStack Pro. The goal of LessonStack is to provide teachers everywhere with the tools to begin teaching using the Atomic approach, so everything you need to teach is free. However, to ensure we can keep building and improving, we offer a pro subscription. The LessonStack Pro subscription unlocks Teams, attachments, and some other advanced features.

To upgrade your account, click on your profile and select settings > subscription.

Refining Your Work

As a teacher I always thought I would have one or two busy years and then I would begin to reuse my lesson plans, dreaming that over time my planning admin would decrease to almost nothing. How naive I was! The reality was that class sizes, courses, technology and modules all changed significantly each year. And because of this my lesson plans quickly became obsolete.

A major disadvantage of traditional lesson plans, is that they do not make it easy to reuse parts of them after they have been created. This is because a traditional lesson plan is written for a specific moment in time, and picking apart the related Objectives and Activities is not easy. On LessonStack, a Stack maybe written for a specific moment, but its constituent parts are transferable and may be used in many lessons over time. Refining those parts is easy and powerful.

With Atomic Teaching, the atoms of your teaching are reusable, whether you’re teaching one class or ten. They also live and breath in a way that traditional lesson plans don’t. You could, in theory, open up a traditional lesson plan and update it during class - but why would you? This may be the last time you ever use this lesson plan. On LessonStack it’s highly likely that you will reuse the activity you are currently teaching, so refining it in real time is not only easy - it pays dividends.

On LessonStack the process of refining your activities is ongoing and expected. You will never truly ‘finish’ an activity, but by making it so easy to edit your activities in real time, they will reach a level of refinement over time that is just not possible using traditional methods.

Who Are Your Teaching Heroes?

At the heart of Atomic Teaching is a simple idea: That all teachers understand the common language of Objective, Activity and Learning Assessment, and that if we make a place where teachers of all kinds can create in that common language and share what they create, then the potential for positive change is huge.

In wrapping up this guide, I’d like to ask you a simple question: As a teacher, who are your teaching heroes? Who are those teachers that have inspired your thinking? Those teachers that have shone a light for you when you were lost. Perhaps they are your school teachers. Perhaps they are your colleagues. I believe most teachers have had a few great people that have driven them forward and inspired them.

But it’s also my belief that it’s common for teachers to experience isolation, especially in their planning. How often do you really get to see a teachers planning outside of your close colleagues? How often do you get to inspire other teachers with your own planning?

On LessonStack we see the potential for teachers to work together to a much greater degree than ever before. We believe that inspirational teachers are common, but meeting them is rare. It’s rare to meet great teachers not because inspirational teachers are rare, but because isolation is common in the teaching community.

It’s time for that to change, and at LessonStack we’re incredibly excited to meet you all.

If you have any ideas, feedback or questions about Atomic Teaching or LessonStack we’d love to hear from you, and if you find LessonStack useful please consider upgrading to LessonStack Pro so we can continue to grow. You can email us at hello@lessonstack.net or find more contact options at https://lessonstack.net/contact

Thank you for reading!