9 Lesson Planning
How can AI tools help produce engaging lesson plans and class meeting activities?
This chapter explores:
- how to prompt an AI tool to produce a draft lesson plan, and how to adapt it for classroom use;
- how to use AI tools to brainstorm classroom activities.
Drafting Lesson Plans
The first steps in any writing task can be the most difficult and time consuming. AI tools can write a first draft of a lesson plan, which can be made classroom-ready through a combination of reprompting and human editing. Here is an example of a prompt for generating a lesson plan first draft:
One RRC Polytech communication instructor, who used ChatGPT to generate a first-draft lesson plan about asking for clarification in a culinary workplace, found that the tool was useful for generating ideas and structure, but significant reworking was needed to make it useable for class.[1] Carefully editing and refining AI output is critical to ensure that the lesson plans produced are as good or better than the instructor could create without the use of AI tools.
Consider ChatGPT’s response to the prompt in the screenshot above. Some instructors may wish to start the class with an intro activity that raises student interest, turn the interactive lecture into a facilitated discovery activity, or have the guest speaker visit prior to the application activities. One or two rounds of reprompting followed by the instructor’s own revisions could turn that initial output into a usable lesson plan.
For those who plan to use an AI tool to produce multiple lesson plans, adding custom instructions could save time. One example of custom instructions might be “Every time I ask for a lesson plan, make sure that each hour of class time has a ten-minute break, no portion of an activity is longer than twenty minutes, and facilitative teaching and active learning strategies are employed whenever possible.” Uploading one or more previous lesson plans with a prompt could also improve the quality of the AI tool’s initial output. For more about reprompting, custom instructions, and adapting AI outputs, please see the Writing and Refining Prompts chapter.
In addition to speeding up lesson planning, AI tools can make lesson plans more effective. One RRC Polytech instructor has used AI to improve their scaffolding by sharing a lesson plan with an AI tool and asking it for a checklist of foundational skills that students would need for completing a task.[2] When provided with information about what has already been covered in the course, AI tools can remind instructors to integrate review of previously taught concepts into lesson plans and make recommendations about how to draw connections between different course topics.[3]
AI tools can also provide suggestions for integrating multiple literacies into a lesson, such as incorporating digital or cultural literacy alongside a core topic,[4] and can be prompted to check or adapt a lesson plan according to a chosen framework or set of prin