Can AI tools such as ChatGPT be used to help plan lessons?
Image produced by MoSAIC using DALL-E 2 edited in photoshop, prompt: ‘a futuristic robot teaching a class 4k photograph’
Reading age: 17+ years
Estimated reading time: 13 minutes
Intended audience: Educators
Author: Gareth Campbell
Some of you may have read about or used the internet’s latest favourite ghost-writer, ChatGPT, and perhaps feared that your pupils may be using this AI tool to cheat on that essay homework that you have just set. But if you’re anything like me (as a student, I would have definitely used this technology to write homework tasks for me had it been available) then you will see AI bots as a way of reducing workload and decision fatigue when it comes to lesson planning.
As a secondary school science teacher, planning lessons that engage students can be a challenging task given ever increasing time constraints. Yes, lesson planning may be one of the daily tasks that teachers find most enjoyable after teaching itself, but consistently coming up with fun and engaging lessons day after day can take its toll on already stretched educators. With the advent of technology such as OpenAI’s Chat GPT, lesson planning has never been easier. And so, I wanted to explore, and test, how ChatGPT can be used to speed up lesson planning to create cross-curricular tasks that can slot into existing lesson plans and enliven them.
If you are unfamiliar with ChatGPT, it is a cutting-edge AI language model that can help you to generate text in a matter of seconds. Lesson plans, poetry, slogans, questions, extension tasks. Anything you may need to add meat to the bare bones that are learning objectives.
Here are three examples of how I have used AI tools to try and help improve the learning experience of my students.
Example 1:
Can AI generate ideas for lessons that are fun and engaging? I decided to find out by experimenting with ideas in my classroom. Note: I am a secondary school science teacher with and interest in cross-curricular learning so that will skew the focus of these resouces, however, the examples I suggest here could be applied to many different subject areas.
Using the GPT-3 model that powers ChatGPT I attempted to create a lesson plan for a biology lesson on animal competition for a year 8 (12-13 year olds) mixed ability class.
I was interested to see if the AI could make something meaningful that could be used unedited or if significant human intervention would be needed. I also wanted a creative writing task in the lesson and so gave the following prompt:
Prompt:
‘Write a lesson plan for a biology lesson to teach 12-13 year old students how animals compete for food, territory, mates and water. Include a creative writing task to summarise the lesson.’
Output in appendix at bottom of page
The output was surprisingly coherent, and not unlike something I may have planned myself, but the pedagogy and sequencing of the lesson was not entirely apparent, so I refined my prompt as follows:
Prompt:
‘Write a lesson plan for a biology lesson to teach a mixed class of 12-13 year old students how animals compete for food, territory, mates and water. Include a creative writing task to summarise the lesson that uses a DALL-E produced image as inspiration. The students have learnt about variation within populations in a previous lesson and will go on to learn about natural selection in the next lesson. The lesson objectives are: To state what organisms compete for and to identify why individuals of the same species compete with one another.’
Output in appendix at bottom of page
The output from this prompt demonstrates how detail in prompt writing is a vital skill to get a useful output. This prompt produced a plan that could be feasibly used, albeit still with significant human intervention to make it work for a given class. To help the students with the creative writing task I produced the following image using DALL-E 2 and expanded the image using the outpainting feature until all aspects of the learning objectives were alluded to in the image.
Image produced by MoSAIC using DALL-E 2 and edited using the outpainting feature, prompt: ‘two lions looking at each other in despair looking out over their territory digital art’
I also used ChatGPT once again to create an exemplar poem so that the students had something to work from if they were stuck on the creative writing task.
Prompt:
“Write a rhyming poem about two lions fighting for territory including at least one metaphor, one simile and the words: competition, mate, water, food, intraspecific, territory”
Edited poem ‘In the African Savannah’ created and edited by MoSAIC using ChatGPT.
The poem that was created had a nice rhythm to it but some of the rhymes were a bit contrived and therefore needed human intervention to make a poem that is somewhat readable and gets the lesson objectives across. It also seemed to struggled with creating metaphor and simile without using the words themselves as seen in these lines that were edited for the final poem:
‘Their eyes a blazing metaphor for the fight that would soon come along.’
‘A simile for the dance of death, a battle of wit and trick.’
I did also ask ChatGPT to write a story about this image, but it essentially just regurgitated the script of the Lion King, which goes to show that the outputs cannot be used blindly.
Download the creative writing summary task resources from this lesson for free here to add to an existing lesson and let us know if you have used it with a class. We would suggest that this would be great as a revision task.
Example 2:
When teaching a group of 11 year olds about antibiotic resistance the key message to get across to students is how us as the general public can minimise the risk of producing resistant strains of bacteria. The usual task that I have done in the past is to get students to create an advert for the NHS telling the public how to use antibiotics effectively. This time around we talked as a class about copywriting as a career, something that my students were unaware of. We then briefly discussed the use of AI language models to create this type of content in a fraction of the time and cost and how copywriting may be a job of the past in the not-too-distant future. With this thought in mind, I challenged the students to come up with a better strap line for their advert than ChatGPT could create.
Prompt:
Write an advertising slogan for the general public to promote the correct use of antibiotics to stop antibiotic resistance.
Output:
"Take antibiotics responsibly: Preserve their power for the future."
I found that having a computer-generated slogan like this really spurred students on to be more creative than the AI and as such produced much more imaginative adverts when compared with previous years that I had done a similar task.
Example 3:
The previous two examples had shown me that using ChatGPT is perhaps more useful for filling in gaps in lessons rather than generating whole lessons from scratch. I’m sure it will be a familiar situation whereby you are desperately trying to rack your brain for an appropriate challenge question to add to your lesson or how to appropriately simplify a passage of text for a differentiated task, particularly at the end of the day, week or term whereby decision fatigue may also be playing a part. ChatGPT can help here. Here are a few tasks that I have successfully used AI to facilitate:
· Write challenge questions for a lesson
· Simplify news articles and other text so that it is more accessible
· Find meaningful links between disparate topics
· Find examples of where a process might happen in nature
· Creating practical methods
· Comparing and contrasting two processes (e.g. osmosis and diffusion)
· Pre-empting common misconceptions in topics
· Finding examples of diverse role models to add to your lesson
· Creating lesson themes for extracurricular lessons on a particular topic
What did I hope to learn?
I wanted to see if the AI could generate a sample lesson plan from the ground up. I also wanted to see if it could generate elements of a lesson plan that are creative and interesting and if they can be used straight out of the box unedited.
What did I actually find?
This experimentation was successful, but there were some limitations. I found that ChatGPT is not yet capable of writing a full lesson plan that can be used in the classroom without modification. The AI model is not creative enough to generate a lesson plan that is practical and useful, especially given the diversity of needs in different classes. This technology is much more useful for generating ideas that can be used to steer our lesson planning in the right direction as well as quickly automating tasks that would take us a long time to do, such as summarising text.
Would it be useful for you?
Chat GPT is still in its infancy, and there are many challenges ahead before this type of technology will improve teacher productivity. The data used to train the model is not guaranteed to be ideal, and it's unclear whether the model is able to make sense of all the data it is given. A lot of professional judgement and specialist knowledge of a topic is therefore required.
There are many challenges ahead before this type of technology will improve teacher productivity. Teachers, as well as students, need more training in AI. But it is too good of a tool to not be using in your practice.
Conclusion
The future of AI-generated lesson plans is still up in the air, but AI has the potential to revolutionise the way teachers approach lesson planning. I believe that this technology could be a powerful tool for teachers who want to make their lives easier and more efficient. Additionally, AI allows you to experiment with new teaching methods, explore creative ideas and incorporate a variety of resources into you lessons with minimal effort. As long as you're willing to put in some time into making sure your lessons are well-crafted, then Chat GPT could be a great way to generate ideas quickly without having to spend hours writing everything from scratch.
Instead of worrying about your students cheating on essay homework tasks, use language models to your advantage, reducing decision fatigue and giving you time to maximise the efficacy of your teaching practice.
About the author:
Gareth is MoSAIC’s founder and works part time as a secondary school teacher in Bristol
Gareth is currently reading: ‘Heartstopper Volume 2’ by Alice Oseman
Don’t forget if you have enjoyed reading about how to use AI tools in your lesson to download the free creative writing task and add it to your lesson next time you teach or revise competition.
Disclosure: MoSAIC has not been paid by any mentioned company in this blog post however we have received a grant in the form of credits from OpenAI to help with our work in education. A huge thank you to OpenAI for this contribution.
Appendix (ChatGPT outputs)
Output for prompt 1: ‘Write a lesson plan for a biology lesson to teach 12-13 year old students how animals compete for food, territory, mates and water. Include a creative writing task to summarise the lesson.’
Lesson Title: Competition in the Animal Kingdom
Objective: Students will understand the various forms of competition among animals for resources such as food, territory, mates, and water, and how it affects their survival and reproduction.
Materials:
Whiteboard or blackboard
Chalk or markers
Images or videos of different animal species and their competitive behaviour
Handouts for students
Writing materials (pen, pencil, paper)
Introduction (10 minutes):
Ask students to share what they know about competition in the animal kingdom.
Write their responses on the board for discussion.
Introduce the objective of the lesson and provide a brief overview of the topics that will be covered.
Direct Instruction (30 minutes):
Define the concept of competition and its importance in the animal kingdom.
Discuss examples of competition for food, such as hunting, scavenging, and foraging.
Show images or videos of animals competing for territory, such as fights between male deer or territorial displays by birds.
Explain how competition for mates influences animal behaviour, such as courtship displays, fights or mating rituals.
Discuss the importance of access to water in arid environments, and how it influences the behaviour of animals such as camels, giraffes, and antelopes.
Guided Practice (20 minutes):
Distribute handouts to the students and ask them to work in small groups to complete a chart listing different animal species and how they compete for resources.
Walk around the room to assist and answer any questions.
Independent Practice (15 minutes):
Ask students to use their handouts and what they learned during the lesson to write a creative story about an animal competing for resources in the wild.
Remind them to include the different forms of competition and how it affects the animal's survival and reproduction.
Conclusion (15 minutes):
Ask volunteers to share their creative stories with the class.
Summarize the key points covered during the lesson.
Write a review question on the board, such as "What are the different forms of competition among animals?" and ask students to write their answers in their notebooks.
Evaluation:
Observe students during independent practice and group work.
Read and assess the creative stories written by the students.
Review the answers to the review question written in the notebooks.
Creative Writing Task: Write a short story about a competition between two animals for food, territory, mates, or water in the wild. Be sure to include details about their behaviour and how the competition affects their survival and reproduction.
Output for prompt 2: ‘‘Write a lesson plan for a biology lesson to teach a mixed class of 12-13 year old students how animals compete for food, territory, mates and water. Include a creative writing task to summarise the lesson that uses a DALL-E produced image as inspiration. The students have learnt about variation within populations in a previous lesson and will go on to learn about natural selection in the next lesson. The lesson objectives are: To state what organisms compete for and to identify why individuals of the same species compete with one another.’
Lesson Title: Competition in the Animal Kingdom
Objective:
To state what organisms compete for (food, territory, mates, and water)
To identify why individuals of the same species compete with one another (for survival and reproduction)
Materials:
Whiteboard or blackboard
Chalk or markers
Images or videos of different animal species and their competitive behaviour
Handouts for students
Writing materials (pen, pencil, paper)
A DALL-E produced image for inspiration (related to competition in the animal kingdom)
Introduction (10 minutes):
Show the DALL-E produced image to the students and ask them to write down any observations or questions they have about the image.
Share their responses and discuss any similarities or differences in their observations.
Explain that the image will be used as inspiration for the creative writing task at the end of the lesson.
Ask students to think about a time when they have had to compete for a resource, and how it felt. Write their responses on the board for discussion.
Direct Instruction (30 minutes):
Define the concept of competition and its importance in the animal kingdom.
Discuss examples of competition for food, such as hunting, scavenging, and foraging.
Show images or videos of animals competing for territory, such as fights between male deer or territorial displays by birds.
Explain how competition for mates influences animal behaviour, such as courtship displays, fights, or mating rituals.
Discuss the importance of access to water in arid environments and how it influences the behaviour of animals such as camels, giraffes, and antelopes.
Guided Practice (20 minutes):
Distribute handouts to the students and ask them to work in small groups to complete a chart listing different animal species and how they compete for resources.
Walk around the room to assist and answer any questions.
Independent Practice (15 minutes):
Ask students to reflect on the DALL-E image and what they learned during the lesson and write a short paragraph about how the animals in the image might be competing for resources.
Remind them to include the different forms of competition and why individuals of the same species might compete with one another.
Conclusion (15 minutes):
Ask volunteers to share their paragraphs with the class.
Summarize the key points covered during the lesson.
Write a review question on the board, such as "What are the different forms of competition among animals?" and ask students to write their answers in their notebooks.
Evaluation:
Observe students during independent practice.
Read and assess the short paragraphs written by the students.
Review the answers to the review question written in the notebooks.
Creative Writing Task: Using the DALL-E image as inspiration, write a short story or poem about competition between two animals for resources (food, territory, mates, or water) in the wild. Be sure to include details about their behaviour and why they are competing with one another.