How to plan a lesson with ChatGPT

Tell ChatGPT "write me a lesson on the French Revolution for tenth grade" and in thirty seconds you have a sheet. Objectives, a sequence, an activity, an exit ticket. It looks finished. In the room it lasts ten minutes, because it does not know who is in front of you, how many minutes you have, or where you stopped yesterday.

The way that works is different. You do not ask it for the lesson. You give it the class.

Claude works the same way. The window changes. The method does not.

What a blank prompt is missing

ChatGPT does not have your period. If you do not hand it over, it invents one: sixty minutes, an average class, a textbook you do not use, an activity you would never run last period on a Thursday.

Before you ask for the plan, put five things in the message.

1. Class and time, in one line. "2B, history, about 16 years old, a 40-minute period." Age alone is not enough. Forty minutes is not an hour.
2. Where you actually are. Not the chapter title. The last thing that happened. "Yesterday we only did the economic causes. We have not opened the political ones."
3. What did not work. "On the famine they nodded. They never said whose hunger it was."
4. What you do not want. "No textbook summary. No twenty-minute debate: I do not have twenty minutes."
5. How the period has to end. "They leave able to name two causes, and why one of them is not enough on its own."

Without those points the sheet belongs to anyone who teaches that topic. With them it is your period, and they take two minutes to write.

The prompt to copy

Paste this and fill only the empty lines. Ask it to answer you as a colleague, not to fill in a template from a website.

You are a colleague. Do not write me a worksheet from a website.

Class: …

Time: … minutes

We are at this point: …

Last time this did not work: …

I do not want: …

By the end of the period they must: …

Give me only this:

• an opening question I can say out loud
• the steps of the period, with minutes
• where I stop if the opening runs long
• one sentence to leave written for next time

The line "do not write me a worksheet" matters. If you ask for "a lesson plan," the model hands you the shape of a lesson plan: three lines of objectives, a group activity, homework. That is the format it has seen thousands of times. It is not your period.

A filled example

You are a colleague. Do not write me a worksheet from a website.

Class: 2B, history, about 16 years old

Time: 40 minutes

We are at this point: causes of the French Revolution. Yesterday, only the economic ones.

Last time this did not work: they repeated "poverty" without saying whose.

I do not want: a summary of the Estates-General, or a twenty-minute debate.

By the end they must: name two causes and explain why one of them, alone, is not enough.

Give me the opening question, the steps with minutes, where I close if they do not start, and one sentence for next time.

The answer you want is not an essay on the Revolution. It is a question you can say as you walk in, a sequence that fits in forty minutes, and a place you can stop without leaving the class in the middle of a game.

How to read the answer before you teach it

Treat it like a substitute's plan. Useful, to be corrected, never to be read aloud as it arrived.

• The minutes add up. Add them. If they make seventy, the plan is already false. Cut before you walk in, not while you are talking.
• The opening question can be said. If you have to reread it to understand it, it will not work in the room. Ask for a shorter version.
• There is a way out. If the opening runs long, you know what to drop. If the answer does not say, ask in one message: "I have ten fewer minutes, what do I cut."
• It did not add imaginary students. If roles, posters, and groups of five appear, and your class does not move seats, delete them. They were not in the prompt.

Then keep the cut version. That is what you teach. The first answer was a draft.

The choice stays yours: what goes in today, what waits until Friday, what you do not ask for at all. ChatGPT removes the blank page. It does not decide the period. That is the same point as Education is not automation.

If the answer is still generic

It is almost always one of these three.

You asked for the topic, not the point you have reached. "A lesson on the twentieth century" produces a chapter. "We are stuck in 1943, they are not clear who signs the armistice" produces a period.

You asked for activities. Four of them arrive, all reasonable, none of them yours. Ask for a sentence to say and the minutes. Activities, if you need them, come out of that.

You kept the first answer. The second message is the one that fixes it. "Remove the group work. The opening question fails if it takes more than three minutes. Rewrite only that part." Do not start over.

A lesson generator, the kind where you pick a subject and an age and download the sheet, has the same limit as a blank prompt: it does not know last period. The difference between the tools is in planner, generator, and LMS. To get the plans in order before you write any of them, start with How to organize lesson plans.

The part the prompt does not solve

Tonight it works. Tomorrow night you type the same five points again, because the chat does not remember that you skipped Thursday, that 2A is two lessons behind 2B, or that you already taught this topic to another class in March.

Pasting the context every time holds while you have two classes and a fresh memory. By November, the context is you.

The other way is to keep the year in one place: lessons, classes, the calendar, the text you already wrote. Then you ask about tomorrow's class, instead of rebuilding it in the prompt. GapFiller does this with ChatGPT and with Claude. The plan stays yours. The chat does not start from zero. The rest is in Plan lessons with your AI. The steps to connect the assistant are in Ask ChatGPT or Claude about your lessons.

Starting tonight

1. Take tomorrow's class, not an ideal class.
2. Write the five points. Two minutes.
3. Ask for the sentence to say, the minutes, and the place you stop.
4. Cut. You teach the cut version.

If you want to stop pasting the context every evening, the lessons can live in GapFiller.