Your Teaching Foundation
You've just completed your first week. Six lessons in six days. And if you've been trying things out as you go — even just one or two prompts — you've already experienced the shift.
Today we pause. We look back at what you've built, calculate the time you're about to save, and make sure the foundation is solid before we tackle Week 2.
Because what comes next is bigger. Marking, reports, and assessment — the tasks that eat more teacher time than anything else. But they're also the tasks where AI can make the most dramatic difference.
First, let's lock in what you've learned.
Your Week 1 system — the complete picture
Over the past six days, you've built a layered system. Each skill builds on the one before it:
Day 1 — The mindset. AI is a multiplier, not a replacement. It handles the first 80%, you handle the final 20%. You've shifted from creator to editor.
Day 2 — The toolkit. ChatGPT for quick tasks, Claude for deep thinking, Perplexity for research. Three free tools that cover 95% of teaching tasks.
Day 3 — Lesson planning. Single lessons, full weeks, full units. One prompt generates a structured, curriculum-aligned plan in under a minute. You review and personalise in 10 minutes.
Day 4 — Differentiation. One prompt, three levels. Foundation with scaffolding, core at standard expectations, extension with challenge. EAL and SEND adaptations built in. Two minutes per resource instead of an hour.
Day 5 — Starters and plenaries. Ten starter types, five plenary types. Half-term banks generated in one prompt. Every lesson begins and ends with purpose.
Day 6 — The full workflow. All of the above in one 30-minute session. Topics to lesson plans to differentiated resources to starters to homework. A complete week, planned and resourced.
That's not a collection of tricks. That's a system. And systems compound over time.
The time savings calculator
Let's be specific about what this system saves you. These estimates are based on teacher surveys and time-tracking studies, compared with the AI-assisted workflow:
Lesson planning: Previously 5-8 hours per week. With AI: 1-2 hours (including review and personalisation). Saving: 4-6 hours per week.
Differentiation: Previously 2-4 hours per week (creating levelled resources). With AI: 20-30 minutes. Saving: 1.5-3.5 hours per week.
Starters and plenaries: Previously 1-2 hours per week (finding or creating activities). With AI: 15-20 minutes (using pre-built banks). Saving: 45 minutes to 1.5 hours per week.
Total estimated saving from Week 1 skills alone: 3 to 5 hours per week.
That's 3 to 5 hours every single week. Over a 39-week school year, that's 117 to 195 hours — the equivalent of 5 to 8 full 24-hour days. Time you can spend with your family, on your wellbeing, or on the parts of teaching you actually love.
And we haven't even touched marking and reports yet. That's Week 2.
Quality check — is the AI output good enough?
This is the question that matters most. Saving time is worthless if the quality drops. So let's address it directly.
AI-generated lesson plans are not perfect. They occasionally include inaccurate content, especially in specialist subject areas. They sometimes misjudge the level of difficulty for a year group. They may suggest resources you don't have or activities that don't suit your classroom setup.
But neither are plans written at 10pm on a Sunday after a long weekend. Tired planning produces tired lessons. The question isn't whether AI output is perfect — it's whether it's better than what you'd produce under the time pressure you actually work under.
For most teachers, the answer is yes. Not because AI is smarter than you. Because AI gives you a strong first draft when you're fresh, and you refine it with your professional expertise. That combination — machine speed plus human judgement — consistently produces better results than exhausted human effort alone.
The key practices that maintain quality:
- Always review subject content for accuracy. You're the expert. Trust your knowledge.
- Adjust for your specific students. Generic differentiation isn't good enough. You know who needs what.
- Test the timing. Run through activities mentally. Does the pacing feel right for your class?
- Keep what works, improve what doesn't. After each lesson, make a quick mental note. Over time, your prompts and review process get better.
Your prompt library so far
By now you should have these prompts saved somewhere accessible — your phone, a Google Doc, a sticky note on your desk. Here's a summary:
Single lesson plan: "Create a detailed lesson plan for [year group] [subject] on [topic]. [X] minutes. Align to [curriculum]. Include objectives, starter, main teaching, differentiated tasks, plenary, and resources."
Weekly lesson plans: "Create a week of [subject] lesson plans for [year group], Monday to Friday. Each lesson [X] minutes. Topic: [topic]. Align to [curriculum]. Show progression across the week."
Three-level differentiation: "Create a worksheet on [topic] for [year group]. Three versions: Foundation ([X] questions, scaffolding details), Core ([X] questions, standard level), Extension ([X] questions, higher-order thinking). Same learning objective."
Starter bank: "Create a bank of [X] starter activities for [year group] [subject] on [topic]. Vary the types: retrieval quiz, odd-one-out, true/false, ranking, and what's wrong with this."
Plenary bank: "Create [X] plenary activities for [topic]. Each should take 5 minutes and assess understanding differently: exit ticket, 3-2-1, explain to a younger student, traffic light, the wrong answer."
Full weekly workflow: "I teach [year group] in [country]. Here are next week's topics: [list]. Generate lesson plans, starters, plenaries, and homework for each."
These six prompts are your Week 1 foundation. They'll evolve as you use them, and by the end of this course, you'll have a complete library covering every major teaching task.
The Week 1 challenge
Here's your challenge before we move to Week 2: plan your entire next week using AI.
Not one lesson. Not a worksheet. The whole week. Use the 30-minute workflow from Day 6. Generate everything you need for Monday to Friday. Review it. Print it. Teach it.
Then notice how it feels. Notice that you have your evening back. Notice that the plans are at least as good as what you'd have created manually — and probably more varied and creative. Notice that differentiation happened without the usual overtime.
If you do this once, you'll see the value. If you do it for two weeks, it becomes a habit. And habits are what change careers.
What's coming in Week 2
If Week 1 was about saving time on planning, Week 2 is about saving time on the thing teachers dread most: marking, reports, and assessment.
Here's what's ahead:
Day 8 — Marking and Feedback at Scale. How to use AI to draft feedback comments, generate mark schemes, and process a set of books in half the time.
Day 9 — Writing Reports That Don't Take All Weekend. AI-generated report comments that sound like you wrote them, personalised and specific.
Day 10 — Building Rubrics and Assessment Criteria. Clear, curriculum-aligned rubrics generated in minutes.
Days 11-14 — Assessment data analysis, exam preparation resources, revision materials, and building your assessment system.
Week 2 tackles the tasks that cause the most teacher stress and burnout. If planning takes your evenings, marking takes your weekends. We're going to change that.
But first — do the challenge. Plan next week with AI. Experience the system working. Then come back ready to tackle the marking pile.