By Lynn Zimmerman
Associate Editor
Editor, Teacher Education
It’s hard to believe that ChatGPT only came on the scene in November 2022. Its emergence opened the floodgates for AI to become part of everyday life so quickly. When AI came on the scene, many educators were quick to understand its benefits for them as teachers and have been eager to use it.
What can AI do for teachers?
When asked, Gemini provided a list showing how teachers can benefit from using AI. It identified the primary benefits as by automating tasks and enhancing instruction.
If you are an educator, look over this list and comment on which ones you have used and benefitted from.
- Automated Administrative Tasks (e.g., grading routine assignments, generating reports, managing schedules).
- Personalized Learning Support (e.g., tailoring content, pace, and resources to individual student needs).
- Differentiated Instruction Assistance (e.g., adapting reading levels, generating varied assignments for diverse learners).
- Content Creation and Curation (e.g., generating lesson plans, activities, assessments, and visual aids from prompts).
- Data-Driven Insights (e.g., analyzing student performance and progress to inform teaching strategies and early intervention).
- Enhanced Student Feedback (e.g., providing students with immediate and targeted feedback on their work).
- Improved Accessibility (e.g., creating real-time translations, text-to-speech, and other accessible materials).
- Support for Continuous Professional Development (e.g., recommending personalized learning resources for educators).
- Time Savings and Reduced Workload (allowing more focus on direct instruction, complex student needs, and engagement).
I’ll start us off by saying that for me as a teacher-trainer, specifically in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) field, I have used it the most for Content Creation. I usually use AI to help generate lesson plans and activities.
In Spring 2025, I needed to design an undergraduate course that I had never taught. Therefore, I needed to create a syllabus and content for 15 weeks. I first looked at the previous instructor’s syllabus and highlighted the topics I wanted to include. Then I emailed a colleague and asked for her input. Like me, she had never taught a course on this topic, but she was familiar with the content through giving presentations and conducting workshops.
With this information in hand, I created a draft outline and submitted it to Gemini, which I generally like for this type of task. In my prompt, I told it what the goals and objectives were for the course and told it that this was my draft outline. I asked it to look it over and see if there was anything that I could omit and if there were any gaps. I also asked it to present it to me in the sequence that it thought would work the best for this one-semester course. Within a minute or so, I had a working draft.
Did I take that outline and run with it? Absolutely not. I looked it over very carefully and identified aspects that I liked and that I thought would fit my context and my course outcomes. I deleted a couple of topics and added a couple. Then I rearranged the order a bit to fit my idea of a logical sequence better.
At one point during the semester, I told the students that they would be asking an AI tool to help them plan a lesson. I explained how I had used Gemini to create the course emphasizing the importance of examining the output critically and making any necessary adjustments.
Most of the students chose ChatGPT because they were accustomed to using it. Our topic that week was Task-Based Learning (TBL). Their task was to ask the AI tool to provide a task-based activity for 6th graders on a given topic in a specific content area, such as science or social studies. Once they had the information, they were to analyze and assess the response. These are the instructions they were given.
Evaluate the AI Output. Critically assess the quality of the AI-generated idea or ideas. Be sure to identify the AI tool you used.
- Is the suggestion a task or just an activity?
- Is the task idea relevant to your chosen topic?
- Is the task idea appropriate for these learners?
- Does the task include opportunities for cooperative learning?
After they had assessed it, they were to explain and describe how they would modify or improve the AI-generated idea to create a more effective TBL lesson. Their final instruction was to reflect on their experience using AI to generate a student task and explain what potential limitations or challenges in using AI for lesson planning they saw when using it for this task.
Overall, the students were satisfied with what AI produced, but they did identify some limitations. A few areas where the students saw room for improvement were:
- inadequate emphasis on authentic communication and language skills
- inadequate emphasis on critical thinking
- Inadequate scaffolding
- inadequate differentiation to meet all needs, interests, and levels
- often creates activities rather than full tasks
They also agreed that this experience showed them that you cannot depend on an AI tool to do all the work. Using an AI tool requires the teacher’s judgment so they can adapt the ideas to fit their students’ needs.
I was satisfied with the outcome of this task, which I created with some assistance from Gemini, because the students got hands-on experience analyzing and reflecting on the benefits and drawbacks of using AI tools for lesson planning. That was my goal for the lesson.
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