How to Use AI to Write Lesson Plans and Save Time in the New Year
As teachers, we've all felt time poor when it comes to writing lesson plans. What if I told you there's a SIMPLE way to get many of those hours back each week? AI tools (like ChatGPT) can literally save the day when it comes to lesson planning for whole group, small groups, differentiation, and more.
If the idea of using AI to help you teach makes you cringe, I promise I’m with you. I was very resistant to trying it because I already feel like we have so much tech in schools. But truly, this is a game changer for time management. If you feel short on time, and your plate is piled high with demands and data analysis, you need AI to take some tasks off of your plate. I have 3 ways that I have used AI to streamline my lesson planning, along with some prompts you can grab below!
1. Brainstorm Lesson Ideas
Sometimes the hardest part of lesson planning is coming up with fresh, engaging ideas (or any ideas at all, depending on how exhausted you’re feeling that day). AI tools like ChatGPT are perfect for brainstorming activities, themes, or creative approaches to teaching a concept.
Simply ask the AI something like, “What are five fun ways to teach multiplication to 3rd graders?” or “Can you suggest a hands-on science experiment about weather for 2nd grade?” The AI can provide you with a list of ideas to get you started, and you can pick the one that you think fits best in your classroom. This is perfect if you already have core curriculum and you have the main lessons you need to teach, but you want to enhance with an extra activity, a game, or a supplemental activity.
Shop ChatGPT Prompts for teachers now!
2. Differentiate a Skill Instantly
We strive to reach every learner in our classrooms, but it can wear us out. Or at least it regularly wears me out to try to make one lesson land well with all of the different students in my classroom! But AI can differentiate any skill you’re teaching! For example, you can ask, “Can you create three activities for teaching fractions—one for advanced learners, one for struggling learners, and one for the whole class?”
AI tools can generate tiered tasks for RTI, extension activities for gifted or high achievers, or scaffolded steps to ensure your lesson reaches every student. While you’ll still need to review and tweak the suggestions, this can be a huge time-saver when planning for diverse classrooms. Just having the starting point saves me a TON of time.
3. Write Details (Observation-Ready!) Lesson Plans
One of the most time-consuming parts of planning is organizing your thoughts into a structured lesson plan. AI can create outlines for lessons, including objectives, materials, procedures, and assessments. For example, you can prompt the AI: “Write a detailed lesson plan for teaching main ideas and supporting details in a 3rd grade ELA class.”
You'll get a comprehensive outline with clear steps and strategies. From there, you can personalize the plan to fit your teaching style and classroom needs. If you don’t love what you get the first time, be sure to give the bot more prompts to understand the time constraints you may have, the styles of learners in your classroom, the structure of your block, etc.
Get started with pre-written ChatGPT prompts today!
I recently asked ChatGPT to write a lesson plan for me, and what it gave me would all be done at once and take a little over an hour to do. I needed the lesson to be re-written into 20 minute increments so I could do it across my whole group time each day for a week. So, I asked for the re-write and the end result was exactly what I needed!
Let AI Amplify Your Expertise
Integrating AI into your lesson planning isn't about replacing you as the teacher. It’s all about enhancing your skills by duplicating your work in a fraction of the time. Think of AI as an assistant that's there to help you streamline the grunt work, freeing you up to focus on what really matters—teaching and truly connecting with your students. I mean, we teachers couldn’t even dream of having an actual assistant. But with AI, we all get one! And you can always start small and see how it feels. Use ChatGPT to write a single lesson plan for a single skill, and see how you like it!
But how do I actually use AI the right way?
The key to using AI to write quality lessons for you, is to give it the correct prompts. A tool like ChatGPT can either be a huge waste of time, because you get a collection of lessons and ideas you have to essentially re-write to be able to use them, OR it can be the biggest time saver of your life. The prompts you give determine whether the end result is your teaching style, will fit into your school day, is aligned to your curriculum, etc.
If you want a collection of 100 AI Lesson Planning Prompts that will save you literally hours and hours of time this school year, you can grab mine below! These are prompts that I have tested and used with great success! Everything from small group planning to enrichment to prioritizing tasks to simple test creation is in here!
Grab yours to get started! 👉 CLICK HERE.
