NOTE: This works with Gemini AI as well.
Welcome to the world of AI, which can do a lot of great things and cause confusion, errors, and embarrassment. Because of the rapid development of the startup world and innovation, this post takes place in September 2025. I have made lesson plans with GPT4, and now there is GPT5. This is supposedly better.
So you want to us AI to make you a fancy lesson plan. Great! But how to do it? What are the prompts? What are the topics? What are possible pitfalls? And so forth….
RULE #1 of AI:
It doesn’t understand anything you ask it.
ChatGPT is a “probability machine.” If you ask it for a picture of a cat, it will look at billions of pictures, pick out the ones described as cat, and then spit back out what it thinks it the most likely picture you want to see. This is why you will hear stuff about AI needing to be trained. If you only train your model on pictures of cats, it will not recognize pictures of dogs.
So why is this important?
Rule #2 of AI:
Accuracy will depend how common and how accessible information/data is.
Information about teaching/learning English is pretty accessible. There are many books, many podcasts, many youtube videos, many graphs, many blogs, etc. And for that, ChatGPT is a great tool to spit out an English Learning Lesson Plan. If you’re trying to teach more niche topics of English or give students an article about something that happened yesterday–this is where things can get wonky. Absolutely, under no circumstances, give students ChatGPT generated content related to historical facts or legal questions UNLESS you are capable of fact checking and rewriting the entire thing if necessary.
However, even in “accurate” circumstances, mistakes can still happen. Thus–
Rule #3 of AI:
ALWAYS review what it gives you before showing it to other people
I have not done this, and it was awkward. A simple matching opposite words activity had two of the same words on one side and a matchless word on the other. The fill-in-the-blank sentence activity had sentences that were very weirdly worded. My students were confused. I apologized and fixed what I could.
I have also had students submit AI as their work without reviewing it as well. They take their assignment, plop it into GPT, and just copy paste the results. And I’m not talking about: I guessed it was ChatGPT by the tone of writing.
It is: I guessed a student used ChatGPT because assignments have multiple steps and you can tell the student just copied the entire instructions, dumped it into GPT, and copy pasted the results because the what the students submission is quiet literally, “For this step, you can say this, or you can say that. [emoji] For this next step, here is idea 1 and idea 2. Would you like help writing this?”
Meaning not only did the students fail the assignment for plagiarism, they also failed the assignment outright, because even the bare minimum effort of checking AI to ensure it actually did the assignment correctly was far too difficult. >:C But that is a topic for another time.
Which brings us to…
Rule #4 of AI:
It is an assistant, not a manager. Don’t let it make decisions for you.
You are a person. ChatGPT is a very agreeable robot who “wants” to make you happy.
The more information you give it, the better results it can give you. The more feedback you give it, the better it can assist you. When you ask it to show you a picture of an animal, and it shows you cat because cats are pretty dominant on the internet–you can’t get frustrated at it for not considering deep sea fish in the Bermuda triangle.
You should be actively specifying your requirements, saying yes/no, ignoring some stuff if favor of others, and adjust your lesson plan according to student needs and class pacing. Lesson Plans are already not meant to be followed exactly; they are a base guide to help structure your class — because there are things you need to think about before the class. How long is the class? What level are your students? What are topics you want to focus on? What are some things you want your students to be able to do by the end of class?
In that, AI can save you a lot of thinking time and creative fatigue and you’re probably going to change stuff or look at other people’s lesson plans anyway. My textbook has a lesson plan, for example. I follow that sometimes and sometimes I don’t. AI is just an additional resource.
But remember, as with all things, it is a resource–not a human substitute.
So without out of the way, here’s a handy-dandy template for chugging out lesson plans.
Lesson Plan Template
Level: ________
Classroom Style: ___________
Time: _______
Class length: _______
Breaks: _______
Theme: _______
Target vocabulary:
- [INSERT WORDS]
Additional Topics:
- [INSERT: Grammar Topics, Pronunciation focus, Culture stuff, etc]
Desired Activities:
- [INSERT: Practice activities, games, reading, textbook content, class assignments, etc.]
Example Lesson Plan
New lesson plan.
Level: A1 Adults
Classroom style: Communicative, so 50% of our class time must be talking.
Time: 9-3pm
Class length: 5 hrs
Breaks:
- 10-10:10
- 11-11:10
- 12-1
- 2 – 3pm is free worktime
We are starting a new unit.
New vocabulary:
- boring
- boss
- create
- exciting
- grow
- location
- satisfied
- together
- try
- work
Theme: Jobs
Additional topics:
- Antonyms
- Saying lists (eg. Firstly, secondly, In addition, etc)
Desired activities:
- There is a listening section in the textbook
- Warmup, possibly listing various jobs
- Dialog practice
And then ChatGPT proceeded to ignore one of the breaks in its proposed schedule, but I usually only follow about 50% of whatever it chugs out in the end. A+ for everyone’s effort! As part of the same chat-window, you can ask it to expand on activities, like writing the dialogs.