Becoming the best of both worlds: AI-enhanced Lesson Planning

Whether you like it or not, the era of AI has arrived and is reshaping the landscape of English teaching. Educators who have already mastered lesson planning are becoming more effective and efficient with the help of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, as well as one-stop AI platforms such as Tweek and Magic School AI. At the request of Prof. Miyuki from the English Department at NKNU, I had the honor of sharing my learning journey with aspiring teachers through this series of presentations. My goal is to facilitate the use of AI in lesson planning for authentic teaching scenarios.

 

The One Prompt Formula to Get Started

Based on my personal experiences interacting with AI, there are five key elements for crafting a good prompt: persona, task, context, format, and example. The clearer and more specific your prompts are, the more likely you are to get the desired results for creating lessons, gathering activity ideas, and generating any written texts.

For example, we can create a custom-made English dictionary with more useful features catering to your needs. Alternatively, we can translate any given text into English and ensure it sounds natural for native speakers at a specific readability level.

When you don't get the desired output, keep the structure in mind and target specific areas of the result. Continue trying new prompts until you're finally satisfied. Through this learning process, you'll get the hang of it and enjoy the magic of AI.

Tried-and-tested Teaching Practices

Teaching English Through English Made Easy: Empowering Students to Challenge Gender Stereotypes

While you can generate as many text-based materials, you definitely still need activity ideas to engage your students. So, with the provided framework, you can have AI provide intriguing activities for reading comprehension, sentence patterns, cross-curricular production, etc.

I've helped some textbook publishers create plug-and-play teaching materials for TETE, Teaching English through English, including activity ideas, PowerPoint slides, demo videos, and written scripts. What used to take me hours for one satisfied lesson now only takes minutes. For example, with the topic of gender stereotypes in superhero movies, I not only crafted more engaging activities, such as identifying the author's purposes and creating your own female superhero with personality traits, but also made worksheets and multiple-choice questions to match the unit's passive voice for grammar.

Of all the TETE teaching materials I've created, every single one has been successfully implemented in my own classroom, both with my ICE students and with my regular classes at KMJH. I've found these materials to be highly effective, and I'm confident in their value. I'm eager to share my experiences and promote the benefits of TETE at workshops for other English teachers in Taiwan.

The Magic of AI for Lesson Planning

For my second presentation, I reviewed what we learned of a framework- generating any given text and then turning it into reading or listening comprehension resources. For example, with Team Taiwan's historic first-ever Premier 12 Championship victory, the captain's inspiring journey from humble beginnings to MVP status provides an excellent example to motivate students' reading strategies.

Bilingual Teaching Practices with AI

Through constant collaborative lesson planning with different subject teachers for their bilingual lesson plans, I've gained lots of experiences and gradually developed an approach to refine their first draft. When examining a bilingual lesson plan, I'll look for its learning objectives and then focus on activities/tasks to incorporate the 3Ls- target words, target sentences, and classroom language. Whether it's PE, scouting, or visual arts, I would create Canva slides to present my ideas to my partner teachers, seeking their feedback and approval. Catering to individual needs and revising the lesson plan to match their students' English levels is the key.

Offering Feedback for AI-enhanced Lesson Plans

Based on what standards can we review a lesson plan and offer suggestions? First, I'll be carefully examining whether the following three align with each other: learning objectives, teaching and learning activities, and assessment. Then, by providing an example of my competency-based lesson plan, I demonstrated how to give a short oral report, including background, highlights, and how AI has been included in lesson planning. Three volunteers proceeded with their work following the structure, complete with my feedback for revisions.

With this series of presentations for aspiring teachers who lack real classroom teaching experience, their lesson plans, without a doubt, have some room for improvement. I cannot emphasize this enough: The best AI can do is assist in lesson preparation. The ultimate success of your lesson depends on your skillful execution and your genuine enjoyment of the teaching process.

I delivered these three talks in English for the Japanese professor to understand. My consistent effort in engaging in regular English conversations on Native Camp has truly paid off. Not only did I want to maintain this level of fluency but also practice explaining things in a simple and vivid way.