Early on in my teaching days — those heady days of Fall 2020 — I discovered I had a visceral hate for writing lesson plans. Don’t get me wrong: I needed them, I just didn’t like making them.
The time in front of the kids was “fun teaching and interacting time.” The time in front of the computer, slogging together what I was going to do for “fun teaching and interacting time,” was “unfun typing and researching time.” The lesson plan is the invoice. The teaching is the job.
But they had to be done. Admin was watching. Reading. ASSESSING. And if there’s one thing videography has taught me, it’s the value of a solid plan. At least I had the consolation of knowing I wasn’t alone. When I was complaining about lesson planning to my mother (a former assistant principal), she treated me to the rueful story of how she’d had to let a perfectly cromulent teacher go once because the woman simply refused to create or file lesson plans.
I knew that generations of teachers before me had the same pain. And some of them didn’t have computers. Or typewriters. Or AI…
This year I’ve got three (really four) separate preps.1 That’s a good bit of planning work — we’re on a block schedule, so that’s four-and-a-half hours a day of teaching that has to be sussed out ahead of time.
Generative AI has taken most of the misery out of it.
It does the heavy lifting of figuring out which standards apply to what I’m covering that day, drops them in the correct box, and explains why. It figures out a learning target — complete with “I am learning…” and “I can…” statements — and puts it in the right place. It makes sure dates are correct. It knows that Chorus starts with our standard warmups and sirens,2 so I don’t have to retype that every time. It knows the journalism kids get a long-form article and a script on Monday, with a quiz over both on Friday. It figures out how to differentiate for kids who learn in different ways.
It doesn’t completely eliminate the… distaste… I have for the process. I still put it off until literally the last minute every week. But it makes the last minute a whole lot shorter. Here’s how I do it.
Originally I set up a custom GPT in ChatGPT — loaded in the standards documents, the district’s official lesson plan template, guidance on what administration expects — and gave it a strong system prompt. Something like this:
📋 My system prompt (click to expand)
As an A/V Teacher AI for Evans Region College and Career Academy (ECCSS), I produce
fully substitute-ready lesson plans formatted in the required ECCSS lesson structure.
All text follows Associated Press (AP) style guidelines: ampersand use is minimized
(e.g., "text and video" instead of "text + video"), and numbers under 10 are spelled
out unless part of a standard, title, or unit name. For any week or date range provided
(or inferred), I default to two-thirds hands-on instruction and require visible daily
evidence of student learning. Each day's lesson plan begins with a bellringer or
activator that prompts students to engage immediately with the day's topic, review prior
learning, or build curiosity for the new standard. This activity appears first in the
daily instructional framework, before the "Opening" component, and includes clear
directions for both students and the substitute teacher.
For each instructional block, I generate a single, comprehensive daily table using
these columns:
- Teacher | Date/Day | Subject
- GSE Standards (exact codes + brief descriptors)
- Learning Intentions with Success Criteria
- Instructional Framework: Time | Component (Bellringer/Activator / Opening / I Do /
We Do / You Do / Closing) | Lesson | Teacher Moves | SWIRL tags (Speaking, Writing,
Illustrating, Reading, Listening)
I cite Georgia Standards of Excellence (GSE) with both the exact standard codes and
short content descriptions (e.g. ELAGSEJ.LE2 [Hazelwood and student press]). I align
my formatting with ECCSS instructional frameworks, SWIRL literacy strategies, and the
Professional Teacher and Student Performance Indicators, emphasizing the teacher portion
when designing lessons. Each chunked lesson description reads like a real teacher giving
step-by-step instructions, with specific teacher moves, student actions, and embedded
SWIRL practices.
Instructional blocks may flexibly subdivide "I Do," "We Do," or "You Do" into smaller
15-minute activities if needed to enhance student engagement and maximize instructional
time. After each day's table, I list:
- Materials Needed
- Differentiated Instruction
- Evaluation of Mastery/Evidence of Learning
I incorporate ECCSS lesson planning protocols, CHS expectations, CTAE guidelines
(including pacing, hands-on requirements, and daily posted learning intentions), and
course-specific standards and syllabi from AVTF, BVPA, Journalism, and Chorus. Lesson
design reflects the ECCSS Professional Teacher and Student Performance Indicators by
modeling clear communication, structured instruction, formative assessment use, student
engagement, differentiation, and professionalism in planning. Plans assume no holiday
unless specified and reflect realistic substitute expectations. I prompt users for
calendar or roster updates to improve accuracy.
The classes I am teaching this semester include a combined Journalism I/Journalism
II/Broadcast Video Production Applications (BVPA) class, a chorus class, and an
A/V II class.I’d basically prompt “this is what I’m teaching this week, here’s how I want to teach it, here’s my general outline for the week,” and then let it do its thing. It worked mostly okay — mostly — but still needed my deft human touch at the end to make it into something more usable.
Time was saved, but not a whole LOT of time.
More recently I moved to Google Gemini CLI. Why Gemini CLI and not Claude or ChatGPT? I’ve found it cheap, good enough for what I’m doing, and somehow I focus a whole lot more when I’ve got a “computer code-y” looking window and blinking cursor in front of me. I’ve learned not to argue with these things.
What I’m doing can be applied to pretty much any AI that supports skills, though. (Quick explainer on what skills are, if you need it.) That’s what I ended up doing to replace the old custom GPT — I used Claude to build a skill, then told Gemini to make that skill its own.
To build it, I basically told Claude everything it would need to know about how I do lesson plans: gave it some sample plans, all the materials my custom GPT had, and any regular or recurring tasks I run every week. Claude did what it does, and produced a .skill file I popped into Gemini with a “make this work for you.” We went back and forth — a lot — for fine-tuning. I told it to do its homework on best practices for teaching, and after a few iterations, I had something I felt was ready.
The skill works like this: I tell Gemini CLI it’s time to work on lesson plans and which subject. It automatically pulls up the class syllabus, checks what we’re officially supposed to be learning this week, and lets me know. I tell it how I want to teach it, how to break it up day by day, any ideas I have for bellringers, activities, etc. If it’s something I’ve taught before, I give it the old lesson plans. If I’ve got a slide deck explaining a concept, I give it a copy.
Then it goes to work. It creates a Word document, filling in my district’s template, and I get to check it for anything that needs to be changed. Simple stuff, I do myself. Anything that just doesn’t work — because of misinterpretations, stuff that won’t work for my particular classroom situation, or just plain weirdness on my part — I tell it to change.
And it does it. And then I have nicely formatted lesson plans that my admins (so far) have been happy with.
Here’s the secret sauce: if I run into something the skill needs to remember for next time, I tell it to do so. We all can use a little self-improvement. On an early run, it made beautifully crafted plans in landscape orientation. Not so good for printing. Now the skill file has a line reminding it to always go portrait. I haven’t thought about orientation once since.
Instead of spending hours every week working up plans like I used to, I now hit it Sunday night for maybe an hour or so, touch up as necessary during the week — because no plan survives contact with reality unscathed — and sleep soundly.
My mother’s teacher refused to see the point of lesson plans. I still kind of see her point. The difference is I’ve got something that disagrees enough to handle most of them for me.
1 Teacher-speak for distinct course preparations — each different subject you teach requires its own separate planning. Three preps means three very different lesson plans every week.
2 A vocal warm-up exercise, not an emergency. Singers slide their voice continuously up and down the scale — like a siren sound — to stretch range and warm up the voice. No police involved.
