Recovering Capacity by Using AI for Lesson Planning and Creating Instructional Materials

Overview

Designing effective, engaging lessons requires substantial teacher time and effort. From crafting presentations and guided notes to developing practice problems and exemplars, educators often spend hours preparing resources to meet the diverse needs of their students.

Generative AI tools can help teachers recover this time by streamlining the creation of quality instructional materials. When used effectively, these tools can generate presentations, sentence frames, worksheets, and other resources in minutes, allowing teachers to shift their focus from resource creation to differentiating instruction, providing feedback, and engaging with students during class.

Example from the School Teams AI Collaborative

At Lynwood High School in Lynwood, CA, English teacher Jacqueline Oropeza integrated AI tools into her planning process to save time and improve student engagement. Preparing for a lesson on research papers and MLA formatting, Oropeza took the following steps:

• Identifying pain points in planning: Oropeza realized she was spending too much time building instructional materials, such as presentations and guided notes, which limited her ability to focus on individual student needs.

• Using AI tools to generate resources: Oropeza created a presentation in Gamma by prompting it to design a student-friendly lesson on MLA formatting with examples and visuals. She then uploaded the slides into MagicSchool AI to generate guided notes and a practice worksheet aligned to her lesson.

• Reviewing, editing, and refining AI outputs: She tailored the AI-generated materials by adding relevant examples, simplifying language for her students, and including scaffolds like sentence frames to support English Language Learners and students with IEPs.

• Monitoring impact and improving over time: With planning time cut in half, Oropeza found she could provide more targeted student support both through in-the-moment feedback and tailoring of instructional materials to her students. She checked in with students to verify that these actions were helpful. Students responded positively to the clearer, scaffolded resources and appreciated the on-the-spot exemplars she could now create.

Reflecting on the experience, Oropeza shared, “I don’t have to spend hours thinking about sentence frames or designing worksheets from scratch. AI helps me stay focused and makes it easier for students to stay engaged.”

Apply This Strategy in Your Context

Generative AI tools can support educators in creating instructional materials quickly and effectively. When used thoughtfully, these tools can help teachers maintain rigor and meet students’ diverse needs while saving time. Here are ways to integrate AI into your planning:

1. Pinpoint Planning Challenges: Reflect on where your lesson planning process takes the most time (e.g., creating slides, writing sentence frames, designing worksheets). In reviewing those elements, identify which are processes that technology may be especially well-suited to support. Make sure to also identify any tasks that humans are uniquely good at and that you should continue to do. For example, AI is best suited for creating a bank of practice questions at differentiated levels while the teacher is positioned to contextualize and adapt the practice questions for their specific students by adding culturally relevant examples and simplifying the language for multilingual learners.

2. Use AI to Generate Instructional Materials: Upload existing presentations, lesson plans, or anchor texts into AI tools to create student-facing resources like guided notes, practice problems, videos, and exemplars that reinforce key concepts.

3. Review AI-Generated Content to Ensure Alignment and Quality: Teachers should review the materials created by AI to make sure they are aligned with instructional goals and to verify information is accurate. As you review the materials, tailor them to your students to meet your unique context.

4. Monitor Impact and Adjust Over Time: Track how AI-generated materials affect your planning time and student learning and engagement. Collect feedback from students on the clarity and usefulness of resources, and refine your approach based on their needs and outcomes.

By thoughtfully integrating AI into the lesson planning process, teachers can save valuable time while delivering more tailored, engaging, and rigorous instruction. This shift enables educators to focus on what matters most: supporting students’ learning and growth.

This AI-enabled strategy was developed by a member of the School Teams AI Collaborative—a partnership between Leading Educators and The Learning Accelerator (TLA). The Collaborative was developed to bring together innovative educators from schools across the country to share ideas and discover effective ways to use AI in the classroom.