Quick-fire lesson planning with ChatGPT
I get asked plenty of questions about how AI can help teachers with their day-to-day – things like lesson plans, resources, and marking. In this short video, I show you one practical way you can use ChatGPT to create a scheme of work, lesson plans and resources in minutes.
How does it work?
ChatGPT is known as a large language model. It’s trained on a massive amount of text data – pretty well the whole of the internet. This means it has a surprisingly good understanding of how language works in context and can generate comprehensive responses to your prompt instructions. But remember, it’s not perfect. Sometimes it gets things wrong, so your human judgment is still essential.
The “Go wide, then narrow” strategy
In the video, I demonstrate how to start broad with your questions and prompts, then gradually get more specific. Here’s the basic flow:
- Role play: Tell ChatGPT to act as a history teacher.
- What does it need? Ask ChatGPT what information it needs to generate a scheme of work (syllabus, year group, etc.).
- Feed it the syllabus: Paste in the details of the GCSE history syllabus. No need to spend a long time formatting.
- Scheme of work: Ask it to produce a table-formatted scheme of work for the entire course.
- Narrow to lesson plans: Pick a section of the scheme of work, then ask for more detailed lesson plans, including timings.
- Even more detail: Keep focusing in – ask for PowerPoint slides, activities, handouts, essay titles, sample answers, and even marking guidance.
The takeaway
ChatGPT isn’t a magical tool, but it can be a great partner to start your workflow off. With back-and-forth refinement, you can save time and energy planning your next lesson.
I’ll share more videos like this showing you how to use AI to save time, get more from data, and bring surprise and delight into the classroom.Â
Darren Coxon is founder of Coxon AI.