Getting started with AI lesson planning
If you’re just getting started with AI lesson planning, you’re probably wondering about one or both of these two fundamental questions:
How can AI lesson planning tools save me time?
Is using AI lesson planning tools ‘cheating’?
In this post, I’ll offer some answers based on my own experience as a full-time teacher who has found AI lesson planning a valuable tool in my teaching toolkit. Where possible, I will suggest specific prompts and approaches you can use to make AI tools as helpful to you as possible, as you begin your journey to incorporate them into your teaching.
How can AI lesson planning tools save me time?
For many teachers, one of the major challenges of the job is workload. Often, the demands of the job just feel like too much for the time we have in the day - much less for any ‘free time’ we get during the school day to do our planning, marking, and other teaching-related tasks. (I know, I don’t need to tell you this!) Luckily, AI tools have the potential to shave hours off of planning time each and every week - adding up to dozens or even hundreds of hours over the course of a school year.
The best way to do this will depend on how you plan your lessons, what subject(s) you teach, and what your school requires of you. If you work at a school that demands full lesson plans for some or all of your lessons - or if you are perhaps a trainee teacher just starting out - then AI lesson planners can be your new best friend. Tools like ChatGPT or Teaching AI can write you a full lesson plan in seconds, including as much or as little detail as you ask for.
A very basic example of a prompt that asks ChatGPT for a lesson plan
The top tip I can offer here is that context is essential. If you don’t provide your AI lesson planning tool with enough information, it will not be able to produce high quality results. The more specific you are, the more tailored your lesson plan or resources will be to your needs and the needs of your students. You should consider providing ChatGPT with - at a minimum - the age or year group of your class, the ability level of your students, the subject you are teaching, and the lesson topic. Learning objectives, prior knowledge, and any ‘non-negotiables’ that either you or your school have decided your lessons must contain are all useful additional context to consider including.
“The more specific you are, the more tailored your lesson plan or resources will be to your needs and the needs of your students.”
One of the reasons I started talking with other teachers about building Teaching AI was that the amount of context that we needed to provide each time I used ChatGPT to create lesson resources was taking more time than I was happy with. We also realised in discussions with colleagues that many teachers don’t have the confidence with technology to identify and provide all the context that a very literal, algorithm-driven system like ChatGPT requires. That’s why we decided to build a platform that makes AI-powered lesson planning quicker and more accessible for everybody.
Here are some quick prompts you could try to get ChatGPT to provide you with draft lesson resources. Remember, you’ll need to add your context!
“Write 10 true or false questions about Leonardo Da Vinci, for an art class of 16 year-olds. Provide answers in a separate list after the list of questions.”
“Draft a paragraph explaining how to multiply fractions, using language suitable for 9 year-old students.”
“Suggest 3 ways I can incorporate drawing into a Grade 2 Science lesson.”
“List 5 questions I can use to check how well 10 year-old students understand the concept of tectonic plates.”
“Give me a bullet-pointed list of key knowledge points for a Year 12 Politics lesson on the Westminster Model of British politics.”
Could you complete any of these tasks yourself? Yes. Can ChatGPT do it much more quickly, thus saving you time? Absolutely! Our users regularly report that they save hours every week. But there is one other very significant question that I keep hearing about AI lesson planning, which I will address now.
Is using AI lesson planning tools ‘cheating’?
Just because we can use AI tools to save us time with lesson planning, does this mean we should? After all, one of the first thoughts that many educators may have had about AI in the classroom is the potential for students to use ChatGPT to cheat. Is it ‘cheating’, then, for teachers to plan lessons using artificial intelligence?
That depends how you choose to build AI tools into your lesson planning. Just as there are likely times when you are perfectly happy to let students use paper or online resources - or even ChatGPT - to get basic information about a task, there are times when you can use these tools to get access to the full range of human knowledge. Just like that hypothetical group of students, the problem would arise when you try to pass AI-generated work off as your own - and especially if you didn’t bother to tweak and change it so it was just right for your class.
Most teachers are already used to the idea that they don’t plan every lesson they deliver from scratch. I’ve heard it said that teachers are like magpies: They shamelessly borrow, adapt, tailor, tweak, and amalgamate existing resources into whichever form is best for the needs of their students. Whether that is by sharing resources within a department, downloading others’ freely and generously shared Powerpoint slides, or copying techniques and approaches they have found on ‘teacher Twitter’, this is something many teachers do all the time.
“Teachers are like magpies: They shamelessly borrow, adapt, tailor, tweak, and amalgamate existing resources into whichever form is best for the needs of their students.”
At Teaching AI, we don’t see the use of AI tools as fundamentally different to these more traditional approaches, except in one essential way: Generally, the resources that teachers share with each other are more reliably accurate than content generated by AI. Because of the way tools like ChatGPT work, occasionally AI simply makes factual mistakes. This is one of many reasons why it is essential that teachers exercise their appropriate, professional judgement and ensure that all the resources they create with these tools are accurate and appropriate for their groups. (I don’t want to overstate the risks here: These sorts of basic factual errors don’t happen very often. However, it is important that teachers understand the limitations as well as the strengths of the tools they use.)
The last key point to make here is that teachers arguably have a fundamental responsibility to do for AI what we do for so many other parts of life: modelling the appropriate way to carry out an activity or use a tool in an ethical and effective way. If we can show students that there are responsible ways to use AI, and model those ways in our lesson planning and within the classroom, then students will see that AI does not need to be a scary or intimidating topic. They’ll also start to see that it can help to enhance their natural abilities and interests, rather than replacing them. I’ve written about this idea - of teachers encouraging students to use AI responsibly - before: Please do have a look back at the rest of our blog posts for more details, and for more ideas on how to use AI in your lesson planning.
If you’re just starting out with AI lesson planning, it can be intimidating. At Teaching AI, we try to make it as simple and accessible as possible. If you want to try AI-powered lesson planning in a straightforward, clearly laid out way, please feel free to try our AI-powered lesson planner: Free Tier members can create any one of 12+ basic resource types. If you like what you can create on the Free Tier, you may want to consider upgrading to the Paid Tier for 20+ more resource types and the ability to download your created resources as Microsoft Word documents with a single click.
