Atomic Teaching is a teaching methodology that emphasises clarity, community and efficiency.
Imagine you have three tennis balls you will throw to a learner. You want the learner to catch all three. How do you throw them? All at the same time, or one at a time?
One at time!
In Atomic Teaching we break our teaching down into single objectives, and we assign each objective an activity and a check for learning. This is one ‘atom’ of teaching – or if you like one ‘tennis ball’ of teaching you will deliver to your class.
A lesson plan in Atomic Teaching looks like a timeline with time allotted to each ‘tennis ball’. We call this a Lesson Stack.
Working this way has some great advantages over traditional lesson planning.
Firstly, it’s extremely clear. When you look at a lesson stack, you can see at a glance exactly where you are in your lesson, what you’ve completed and what you have left to complete. And you can also see with clarity exactly what you should be doing at each stage of your lesson.
Having a timeline gives you a clear structure to work to. For new teachers this is a level of clarity gives security and lifts some of the mental workload. As teachers become more experienced, having a rhythm and structure to work to gives a base to improvise and adapt – like a jazz musician playing around a beat.
Secondly, it’s very easy to share atoms of teaching. That means it’s easy to work in a teaching community and swap atoms of teaching with each other, knowing that everyone is working to the same clear format.
One of the key goals of LessonStack is to ease the burden of planning by making it easy for teachers to share chunks of teaching all over the wold.
Lastly, Atomic Teaching makes it easy to refine and re-use your planning over time. Many traditional lesson plans are built for specific curriculums and moments in time, and re-using your teaching preparation can be a time consuming task of unpicking the elements you need as modules and classes change.
It’s must easier to re-use and adapt atoms of teaching. You can simply drag and drop the chunks you need that fit your class.
Reusing your work comes with a a range of side benefits.
On LessonStack you are able to see which of your atoms are being used frequently, and are worth taking the time to reflect on and improve. You can see who is using your activities and see the ways other teachers are tweaking them.
And on LessonStack we emphasise making small improvements over time, growing your the quality of your teaching with help from community and at a rate that you can sustain for a lifetime.
Best of all, LessonStack is free, and a core part of our mission is to keep it that way. LessonStack supports itself by allowing users to create private teams for their departments at a small fee, and this is allows us to keep the teaching community free.
And we’re a little biased, but we think we’re on to something special.
Happy Teaching!
Rex T x