Everywhere I look, AI-based tools like ChatGPT are being heralded as the future. Advertisements for generative AI courses are everywhere, all emphasizing how the world is moving towards AI and warning that if we don’t upskill, we’ll be left behind. It’s overwhelming to see these ads and feel a sense of inadequacy, which ultimately led me to purchase a very expensive generative AI course. 

However, as I went through the course, I noticed that while the content on marketing, prompt engineering, article writing, and email writing offered valuable and transferable skills, I noticed it failed to cater to the unique needs of a teacher or a teacher coach. Teaching as a profession is yet again being left behind when considering the transformative impact of AI tools.

As a teacher coach in MCD (Municipal Corporation of Delhi) schools, a part of my work involves lesson planning and integrating global teaching tools and resources with national and state policy guidelines like NCERT, MCD plans, and worksheets—into cohesive teaching flows for regular topics, to ensure teachers are equipped to create engaging and effective classrooms for children in alignment policy goals.

Whether a coach or a teacher, juggling multiple knowledge resources to design effective lesson plans catered to specific and personalized needs can feel overwhelming. While sketching ideas in a diary and planning collaboratively with teachers works in the short term, building this as a non-time-consuming practice and meeting long-term student learning require quick codification of practices. This itself depends on thorough documentation of the lesson planning, and for people focused on on-ground execution, creating this within the time and administrative constraints every day is a significant challenge.

Keeping these constraints in mind, my team and I explored whether ChatGPT could help make our documentation process easier and more efficient. In this blog, I’ll share the specific prompts and strategies that worked for us in addressing this challenge.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Since I work in an MCD school, the PDFs we upload are NCERT books and MCD lesson plans. However, the prompts mentioned below can be used for any curriculum

• The free version of ChatGPT allows you to upload PDFs only once a day, so plan your uploads accordingly

• At Simple Education Foundation, we use specific lesson planning, but you don’t have to stick to it. If you’re more comfortable with any other lesson-planning approach, feel free to use that instead

1. Review the Government's Monthly Planner

The first step before writing the prompt is to look at the monthly planner / any other planner shared by local education bodies like the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. Prioritise which chapters you want to focus on this week.

2. Download and attach NCERT chapter PDFs

Let’s assume this week you want to focus on the Hindi chapter Chanda Mama and the math chapter on Data Handling. So you will get the PDFs of these chapters and attach them to the ChatGPT.

Prompt for when two NCERT chapters are attached:

I am a teacher of Grade 2 students and have 4 days (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday) to complete the two attached chapters. Please create a weekly plan for these chapters. The chapter Chanda Mama needs to be completed in 3 periods (1 period = 40 minutes), and the chapter Data Handling needs to be completed in 6 periods (1 period = 40 minutes).

The weekly plan* should be in a tabular format and include the following details:

• Objective: One objective for each period, with the weekly objectives scaffolded.

• Evoke: An opening activity to introduce the topic, aligned with the objective.

• Explore: An exploration task sourced from the attached book.

• Extend: A task from the book (if available) or a suggested activity to build on the exploration task in point 3.

• Evaluate: Suggested closing questions to evaluate students’ learning outcomes.

*note: this plan is based on SEF's Lesson Planning Structure and can be tweaked to any outline you like

When writing a prompt it's important to keep three elements in mind:

• Give your context: How many periods and days do you have to complete these chapters?

• Mention in what format you want the final weekly plan

• Specific elements you want in your plans like scaffolded objectives, 'I do, we do, you do' exercises etc.

What happens next?

As you can see, the prompt provides a day-wise breakdown of the two chapters.

Is it perfect?  Maybe not, but it offers a clear starting point for what your day could look like, and it takes away that overwhelming feeling of having to document your entire weekly plan from scratch.

If you’re a teacher or a teacher coach who primarily uses NCERT books for planning, this prompt will likely meet your needs. However, if you're someone teaching in the Delhi government teachers and want to incorporate MCD lesson plans into your planning or want to include any other sample lesson plans in your classroom, then, you can upload the NCERT PDF along with the corresponding lesson plan to create a more integrated and comprehensive plan.

Prompt for when multiple sources are attached:

I am a teacher of Grade 2 students and have 2 periods to complete the attached chapter. I have provided two PDFs: one is the NCERT chapter, and the other is the suggested lesson plan. Please create a unit plan for this chapter, which needs to be completed in 2 periods (1 period = 1 hour).

The unit plan should include suggested activities from both the lesson plan and the NCERT chapter. It should be presented in a tabular format and include the following components:

1. Objective:

   • Objective 1: Students should be able to read and comprehend the poem.

   • Objective 2: Students should be able to understand new words and create sentences using them.

2. Evoke: An opening activity to introduce the topic based on the objectives (this can be taken from the NCERT book).

3. Explore: An exploration task sourced from the attached PDFs.

4. Extend: A task from the PDFs or a suggested activity to build on the exploration task mentioned in point 3.

5. Evaluate: A suggested closing worksheet that should be taken from the NCERT book.

Additionally, please create the plan in simple and easy-to-read Hindi and include page numbers instead of linking the files.

3. Converting the Tables into Shareable Formats

To make this plan shareable via a different format you can also prompt ChatGPT to do the following:

Prompt to convert this table into an Excel Sheet:

Create an Excel sheet with the following specifications:

1. Use the existing table structure for the unit plan, keeping the current columns (e.g., Objectives, Evoke, Explore, Extend, Evaluate) in green.

2. Add the following as new columns, and colour these pink to differentiate them:

   • SEF or any testing strategy to be incorporated

   • Resources/TLMs I need to find or create

   • Teacher's suggestions during co-planning

   • Support needed: This column should have a dropdown menu with the options: Binsy, Devanshi, and Sagar.

ChatGPT will create the Excel sheet for you even to a specified color scheme. While ChatGPT can’t create Google Sheets directly, you can simply copy and paste the table into a Google Sheet or any other preferred platform

Do you need to repeat this step every time? Not at all! Once you’ve created the Google Sheet, you can simply copy and paste the table from ChatGPT’s response into it each time. This way, all your weekly plans will be organized and stored in one place.

You might feel there are many steps to follow, but remember, this is only for the first time. Once you save these prompts, you’ll find that creating these plans becomes faster and easier with practice.

4. Room for Improvement

It’s important to note that ChatGPT provides a structure and flow for your lessons—this is already 50% of the task done! However, to make the most of this framework, you’ll need to manually refine and adapt it using your experience and expertise. This process should enhance, not compromise, your creativity and autonomy.

Here’s an example of a plan my colleague, Devanshi, created. She beautifully integrated pedagogical strategies like “Hot Seat” and “Think-Pair-Share” into the plan manually, showcasing how this approach can be both structured and flexible.

This entire process is designed to help you with the grunt work that takes up a lot of time. For teacher coaches who work daily on the ground, there’s often limited time for designing and planning. The key is to keep experimenting with these prompts. As ChatGPT evolves, you never know what new possibilities you might discover! :)

If you are a teacher or a teacher coach, let us know if you use this guide or if you have experimented with AI in any other way. Get in touch through connect@sef.org.in!