What if lesson planning took half the time and sparked twice the ideas?

Imagine freeing up hours each week while generating richer, more creative lessons. With generative AI, you can move through lesson planning from the beginning when you have a blank screen staring back at you to refining exciting ideas within minutes. AI doesn’t replace your professional wisdom – it amplifies it.

Why use AI in planning?

Brainstorming Big Ideas

Using generative AI to explore conceptual understandings, unit themes, and interdisciplinary links can help discover connections you may not have thought of previously. 

Prompt suggestion: “list big ideas for a unit on human migration for grade 6 social studies”

Generate provocations or driving questions

You can easily get multiple options for starting an inquiry with curiosity by asking generative AI for prompts related to your concept, or topic, at an age and stage appropriate level.

Prompt suggestion: “give me 5 inquiry questions related to sustainability and student action for grade 6 students”

Design inquiry-based tasks

Generative AI can help suggest real-world scenarios or thinking routines tied to your unit. Although be mindful to check these scenarios for underlying bias, outdated, or inappropriate information.

Prompt suggestion: “design a formative task that helps students explore ethical decision-making”

What planning tasks can AI support?

Unit outlines

Generating a rough unit plan with key concepts, topics and activities has never been faster. As an added bonus ask AI to align ideas and tasks with specific inquiry frameworks such as UDL, or MYP. Being as specific as possible with your prompts will help the AI generate the most useful information for you.

Tools like ChatGPT also often have a memory feature so once you have provided specifics about your teaching context, it will remember those details for your next planning session, and additional rubrics.

Prompt example: you are a grade 7 individuals and societies teacher teaching IB MYP in British Columbia, Canada. Create a unit outline exploring the curriculum big idea: “Religious and cultural practices that emerged during this period have endured and continue to influence people.”, exploring the content of: “origins, core beliefs, narratives, practices, and influences of religions, including at least one indigenous to the Americas”. Your IB Key Concept is: Identity,
Related Concept is: perspective, and Global Context is: Belief Systems. The unit should take about 10 hours to complete, and include a formative and summative assessment that have the same assessment criteria. Students should be assessed on the IB standard rubric Criterion D: Critical Thinking, strand iii: analyze a range of sources/data in terms of origin and purpose, recognizing values and limitations . Both the formative and summative task should only take one class each to complete, leaving 8 classes for students to explore content and build the skills needed to complete these assessments. Any examples in the unit plan should come from the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome or Greece. All resources students need should be available online for free without a required login.

Once I’ve used a prompt like this for each of the subjects or grade levels I teach, in future planning sessions all I need to say is the grade level I want to unit to be for and it will remember that I am an IB MYP teacher, working in British Columbia.

Statement of inquiry brainstorming

For the IB teachers out there, you can also get help crafting or refining statements of inquiry by providing the AI with your key concept, related concept, and global context. 

Prompt suggestion: suggest 3 statements of inquiry using the key concept of systems, related concept of power, and global context of fairness and development for individuals and societies 9” or refine this statement of inquiry “belief systems shape identity and influence how people view the world, both in the past and today“

Formative and summative task ideas

You can use generative AI to quickly generate assessment ideas that align with a unit’s assessment criteria or inquiry goals. In my experience the first suggestion is rarely, if ever something I grab and go but it is a great place to start. Often I find I can prompt the AI to make certain changes to align better with what I am looking for. You can also ask the Ai to make adaptations to the tasks for individual students who have different learning needs.

Curriculum alignment checklists

Asking AI to make a list of learning outcomes, keywords, or assessment strands that were used within a unit so you are able to cross-check these outcomes with your plans, and any school or provincial expectations. 

You can also do this in reverse by telling the AI what your expectations are and requiring its outputs to align – remember the tool is not perfect so you should always double check that you are actually meeting all requirements.

Prompt suggestion: teaching in British Columbia in a grade 9 classroom, what should I include when designing a grade 9 social studies task aligned with critical thinking and source analysis?

Cautions and considerations

Always double-check for accuracy, depth, and cultural relevance

Generative AI may miss the nuance within the curriculum, oversimplify concepts, or include biased phrasing. Never assume the content produced is ready to use without revisions. 

Use generative AI as a co-planner – not a substitute

Just like we want to teach our students – AI is not a substitute for you doing the work. It should be used as a tool to help you become more efficient, however, your pedagogy, knowledge of your students, and your local context still matter. Think of it like AI suggesting what you could do, but ultimately you should be the one deciding what works for you and your teaching context. 

Reimagine your planning process – not by replacing your voice, but by enhancing your creativity and saving your precious time.