Your first AI wins: 5 everyday tasks

When you finish, you can run five classroom-prep tasks with AI and check each result.

Win 1: A lesson skeleton

Weak prompt: “Lesson on the water cycle.” Strong prompt: “Create a 40-minute lesson skeleton for grade 5 on the water cycle with a hook question, a short mini-lesson, a hands-on activity using everyday materials, and a 3-question exit ticket. Include a vocabulary list.”

Check for: factual errors, activities that need materials you do not have, and timing that is unrealistic. Try the activity yourself or imagine it with your actual class.

Win 2: Three reading levels

Weak prompt: “Make this easier.” Strong prompt: “Rewrite this passage that I wrote at three levels for grade 6: easier, on-level and challenge. Keep these key words: [list]. Add 3 questions per level.”

Check for: meaning drifting or facts changing as the text gets simpler, and levels that are not really different. Never paste a student’s writing or a document with student names. Use your own text or public-domain text.

Win 3: Rubrics

Weak prompt: “Make a rubric.” Strong prompt: “Draft a 4-level rubric for a grade 8 argument essay with criteria for claim, evidence, reasoning, organization and conventions. Student-friendly language. Under 200 words.”

Check for: criteria that do not match what you taught, vague words like “good,” and levels that overlap. Test the rubric on a sample you wrote yourself.

Win 4: Family communication

Weak prompt: “Tell parents about the test.” Strong prompt: “Write a warm, brief template message to families about an upcoming unit test, with placeholders for date and topics, tips for studying at home and a note to contact me with questions. Grade 6 reading level.”

Check for: tone, accidental promises, and anything that could single out a child. For families who speak other languages, use your school’s approved translation service for important messages.

Win 5: Feedback starters

Weak prompt: “Write feedback for my students.” Strong prompt: “Give me 12 specific feedback sentence starters for grade 4 narrative writing, some praising, some pointing to a next step.”

Check for: generic praise that means nothing. Personalize each comment from the actual work in front of you. Starters speed you up. The attention to each child is still yours.

Practice now

Choose one win. Write a weak and strong prompt, run both, and compare.
Create a rubric with AI and test it on a sample paragraph you wrote. Note what you changed.

Use any AI assistant you have. Do not paste private, client or patient information into it.

Check yourself

1. What text should you give an AI tool when leveling a reading?

2. How do you test a new rubric?

3. Why personalize feedback starters?

Ask the AI tutor

Ask anything about this lesson, in any language. The tutor is an AI: it can be wrong, and it never needs your personal details.

Next lesson: Guardrails for K-12 teachers

AI-drafted. Checked by an automated validator and a separate AI reviewer; a person has not read every lesson. Translations and tutor answers are AI-made. Found a mistake? Tell us. AI can be wrong. General information only, not professional advice. Not affiliated with any AI company named. Current University is not accredited.