AI Generated Lesson Plan

I had used generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools prior to this task, mostly for personal use.
As a result, I already had some understanding of how the quality and specificity of a prompt can influence the quality of the output generated.

When crafting my prompt, I considered several factors including the year level of the students, the relevant Victorian Curriculum content descriptor, and the need for the lesson to be practical and achievable within a typical classroom setting. I also wanted the lesson plan to include opportunities for explicit instruction, guided practice, independent application, and assessment. Additionally, I considered the diverse learning needs of students and later refined the prompt to include differentiation strategies for learners who may require additional support.

To generate the most relevant lesson plan, I provided the specific curriculum code and requested that the lesson be designed for Year 9 English students. I then built upon the initial response by asking for adjustments and additional detail, particularly around supporting students with learning difficulties.

I was surprised initially that it could so seamlessly incorporate both learning intentions and success criteria, but given that the sources ChatGPT used included the Victorian Curriculum, UDL guidelines and several research papers on practical pedagogy of teaching, this actually makes a lot of sense.

Overall, I was satisfied with the output generated by the AI. The lesson was logically structured, aligned with the curriculum and included clear learning intentions, success criteria, and assessment opportunities. One strength of the lesson plan was the speed with which a complete and coherent lesson sequence was produced; obviously this is much faster than relying on multiple curated sources and generating a lesson by yourself. However, a weakness was that some activities and examples are quite generic and would require teacher modification to suit a particular class and likely would need to be tweaked over time based on practice and experience with what could work better in which ways. The AI remains as uninspired as ever and pretty obviously lacks that human intuition and ‘warmth’ that comes with learning through practice and intuition, not just websites and datasets.