Researchers have predicted years ago that AI can save 5% of teachers’ time spent on lesson preparation. Now when we see how well AI works, that 5% seems an understatement. My belief is that besides saving preparation time, AI also improves the pedagogical quality of lessons that teachers are hosting. And that has a massive positive impact on all areas of teachers’ work.
The Link Between Poor Lesson Planning And Negative Behaviour In The Classroom
As a primary school teacher, I found the most enjoyable moments were when my students were deeply engaged in their work, it gives a fantastic feeling to see everyone busy and accomplishing something meaningful. A task with clear goals, that sparked creativity and included meaningful social interaction guaranteed positive outcomes. On the other hand, the most frustrating moments were when the class lacked motivation, and I had to struggle to push them to study. Teaching a class that lacks motivation feels like trying to pull a heavy rock uphill - you lose a grip for a second and it starts rolling back down again. In those lessons when the students lacked motivation, their frustration usually escalated into bad behaviour. The reason for the lack of engagement was not because my students wouldn’t have liked school. To be perfectly honest, I had these problems because of poor planning of lessons. When I entered the classroom without a proper plan, the pedagogical quality of the lessons was poor. That being said, if I did have a well-planned lesson, I didn’t struggle at all keeping students motivated. But why then, I didn’t put more effort into planning lessons? Simply because planning the lessons was too time-consuming. It’s really hard to come up with ideas from scratch, especially when you’re supposed to do that after school.
Let’s Step Into a New Era of Lesson Preparation
As said at the beginning, a solid lesson plan is the backbone of a pedagogically sound lesson and a guarantee of higher student motivation. We hope to reduce the burden on teachers to plan great lessons.
We've launched the first version of Freddie – an AI-based lesson planning assistant. It helps teachers to plan activities and package the ideas into a format of pedagogically sound lessons. For sure, many ideas it provides need tweaking, but altogether, we’re already amazed at how well it works in any language.
This is the start of something new and exciting, we welcome you to try out Freddie and let us know how it should be developed further!
Access Freddie at www.freeed.com/teaching-ideas