Transform Your Teaching With AI Lesson Plans

Lesson planning is a staple teacher activity; it's almost as old as the teaching profession itself. Before the internet, teachers could buy lesson plan template notebooks; more recently, downloading them from a trusted source was the go-to strategy. Now, we have another evolution: AI lesson planning. This new lesson plan iteration offers teachers innovative, efficient, and personalised ways to develop their curriculum.

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What to Know About Lesson Planning AI Tools

Across the internet and in school hallways, the news is all over the place regarding lesson planning AI tools. After combing through pages of reliable resources¹, we distil that information here.

How Can AI Help Teachers With Lesson Plans?

With proper input from you, AI lesson planning tools can produce class outlines, along with accompanying study materials, worksheets, and quizzes. You may also prompt your platform to suggest class activities. If your AI is so equipped - and you prompt it to, it will generate assessments and feedback on student performance.

The Department for Education (DfE) is working double time to select and train the models that will best serve UK teachers' and students' needs. Now, let's highlight the general benefits these tools offer.

The Benefits of AI Lesson Plans

The purpose of (AI) which is for us to train it, to train us, to train it ...

Yanis Varoufakis, Greek economist

'Saving time' is the top AI benefit everyone touts² and, indeed, these are time-saving utilities. It won't feel that way until you get past the learning curve, though. As Yanis points out, the learning happens on both sides. Just as you must learn how to use these systems to your advantage, the AI platforms must learn about your teaching goals and preferences.

You'll see the time-saving benefits once you're past that learning stage. Not just in how quickly AI tools can generate timetables, but also in completing other administrative and class preparation duties. Overall, incorporating lesson planning AI tools can help in these areas.

You'll note a lot of 'can' and 'should' here. A lot of what AI delivers depends on what you give it to do. Here, and to make AI do what you want it to, mastering AI skills is vital. To that extent, the DfE has laid out AI professional development courses, so you can make the most of the tools at your disposal.

Top Lesson Planning AI Tools

As you might imagine, AI lesson planning tools abound. Here, we feature those tailored to the UK education system³. And then, just to keep things interesting, we add two bonus platforms which, while not tailored to UK education, are available to UK teachers.

Kuraplan UK

Hailed as the #1 AI lesson planner for UK teachers, Kuraplan offers Ofsted-ready lesson planning, as well as a host of other benefits.

TeachMateAI

TeachMateAI has enabled our teachers ...

Amy Wells, headteacher

Designed specifically for UK teachers and school leadership, this platform features more than 150 utilities to streamline lesson planning, classroom management, and administrative tasks⁴. Among them, you'll find:

This tool aligns with the UK government's Five Regulatory Principles, as well as Ofsted guidelines. With TeachMateAI, you needn't worry that you're in compliance with our government's policies on AI usage.

Aila by Oak National Academy

This GPT-4-based platform owes much of its success to the Oak National Academy teachers and administrators. Since 2024, they've input and uploaded their school's relevant materials, resulting in an exquisitely trained utilities suite. Among its key features, these are tops:

Note that Aila plans an update in the near future that will allow image generation and possibly video creation, too. In the meantime, you could use AI platforms like Fliki to generate video and voice recordings from text. Now, for the two AI lesson plan generators not specifically designed for UK schools and teachers.

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How to Use AI for Lesson Planning

As mentioned above, our DfE and other organisations have put together a series of training modules to prepare teachers for this monumental shift. Here, we deliver a few tips and 'good to know' points.

Steps to Creating Effective AI Lesson Plans

If you've dabbled in AI creation, you already have some idea of how these platforms work. You'll note that these steps are much the same as when you create other materials using AI. These are specifically meant for creating lesson plans⁵.

🔢Number	💻Step to take	👩‍🏫What it does
1	Identify your lesson's goals and what you need to achieve them.	Helps determine which parts of lesson planning to automate or enhance.
2	Choose the right AI platform.	Choose a platform that supports the national curriculum and accords with your lesson goals. Gives you a framework to build all you AI-generated lesson plans and materials.
3	Input needed information.	Define your subject, grade level, learning objectives and other parameters. Gives the AI a structure upon which to build your lesson plans.
4	Review and adjust or customise, if necessary.	Go over the generated lesson plan for accuracy. Change variables as needed to meet your lesson and teaching goals. Ensures the system will remember your preferences for future lesson plan crafting.
5	Implement the generated plan.	Follow the generated plan, making notes of its effectiveness and outcomes. Lets you see how AI-generated lesson plans work in practice.
6	Evaluate outcomes	Solicit student feedback. Determine what worked well and what to adjust in your AI lesson planning. It trains the machine to deliver the best results for your needs.

AI Lesson Planning Best Practices

It's tempting, when we have machines to do our work for us, to leave them to their own devices. That might be fine with, say, your washing machine.

Keeping up to date on AI innovations and using them to their best effect will help you keep your teaching innovative and engaging.

tb Rule #1 of working with AI Ensure data privacy, even when generating lesson plans.

AI Lesson Planning: Common Concerns

That’s not to say that we should embrace AI lesson plans with no regard for the possible risks and downsides. I remember with fondness imagining my students' reactions to the planned lessons even as my pen moved across the paper to formulate timetables. Using AI tools raises the real possibility of a disconnect between our intentions and their proposed delivery.

And, by extension, between us and our students. But it doesn't have to be that way and, in fact, the intent of AI lesson planning is to give us more time to focus on our students. You can still anticipate your pupils' excitement as you input lesson plan prompts into your AI platform. You must still keep them in mind as you devise your lessons; AI will never change that.

Will AI Replace Teachers?

That's a valid concern, as most other formerly stable career fields are now under threat. But AI cannot and will not take teachers out of their classrooms⁶. Every guide to AI in education emphasises it's simply not created with that intent.

These platforms will make teachers' administrative work much easier. In fact, they might eventually do away with the need for any report writing and marking. However, AI can never replace the human element every good teacher brings to their classes.

AI tools are for helping teachers, not replacing them. They can enhance teachers' effectiveness by taking on much of the administrative work teachers do. And they can enhance students' learning experiences with all the materials it has the ability to create. Without eternal reports to write, you'll be there with them, engaging with them and directing their learning, as you've always wanted to do.