Teacher Prompts: Creating Lesson Plans, Quizzes, and Rubrics

Teaching has always had two distinct workloads: the human one (being in the room with students) and the paper one (planning, marking, designing assessments). AI cannot do the first — but it can give you back several hours a week of the second, if you prompt it like a professional. This tutorial shows you how to turn AI into a tireless assistant that drafts, never decides.

1. Introduction

Most teachers do not need AI to "do their job". They need AI to take the first 70% of a task — the draft lesson plan, the bank of practice questions, the first version of a rubric — so they can spend their limited preparation time on the 30% that requires professional judgement. The danger is the opposite: copying an AI-generated lesson straight into the classroom and discovering at 9:15 a.m. that it does not actually match your students, your syllabus, or your school's policy.

The prompts in this tutorial are designed to keep you firmly in the editor's seat. AI drafts; you decide. With practice, you will find a lesson plan that used to take an hour now takes fifteen minutes — and the fifteen minutes are spent on the parts that matter.

2. The Concept Explained

A great teacher prompt does three things: it tells AI exactly which curriculum and level you are teaching, it forces output into a structured lesson-plan template, and it builds in differentiation so the plan serves stronger and weaker students in the same room.

Most school lesson plans follow a recognisable rhythm — a hook to grab attention, an explicit learning objective, direct instruction, guided practice, independent practice, and a check for understanding at the end. If your prompt names that structure, AI fills each block far more usefully than if you simply ask for "a lesson plan".

3. The Problem Without Good Prompts

Write a lesson plan on photosynthesis.

4. The Solution

Act as an experienced Year 8 science teacher.

Plan a single 50-minute lesson on
"Photosynthesis: inputs, outputs, and why it matters"
for a mixed-ability class of 28 students.

Use this exact structure with time allocations:
1. Hook (5 min) — a curiosity question or short demo
2. Learning objective (2 min) — written on the board,
   one sentence, student-friendly language
3. Direct instruction (15 min) — key concepts, with
   one analogy and one diagram I should draw
4. Guided practice (10 min) — paired task, with the
   exact instruction I read out
5. Independent practice (10 min) — short worksheet,
   include 3 questions ranging easy → challenging
6. Exit ticket (8 min) — one written question that
   tells me who has understood

Also include:
- One differentiation strategy for two stronger students
- One scaffold for two students who struggle with reading
- A list of materials I need to prepare

5. Step-by-Step: Three Core Teacher Prompts

1. The lesson-plan prompt. Always specify the year group, the topic, the lesson length, and the named structure. Add differentiation, materials, and exit ticket explicitly — AI ignores them by default.
2. The quiz-bank prompt.

   Generate a 20-question end-of-unit quiz on [topic] for Year [X]. Mix of formats: 10 multiple choice, 5 short answer, 3 problem-solving, 2 extended response. Provide a separate mark scheme. Mark each question's Bloom level so I can see the balance.

3. The rubric prompt.

   Create a 4-level marking rubric for a [task type] in [subject]. Levels: Emerging, Developing, Secure, Mastery. For each level, give one observable indicator per criterion (3 criteria: content accuracy, structure and clarity, use of evidence). Use language students can read.

4. Test the output on a real student. Before you teach the lesson, imagine your weakest student attempting the worksheet. Are the instructions clear? Are the easy questions actually easy? Adjust before printing.
5. Keep your professional voice. Edit the AI draft into your own words and your own classroom routines. Students notice when a worksheet does not "sound like" their teacher.

Tip: Build a "teacher prompt library" file — one lesson-plan template, one quiz template, one rubric template, one parent-email template. Each starts as a strong prompt with placeholders for the topic and year group. After a term, you will be filling in three blanks instead of writing the prompt from scratch each time.

6. Practice Exercises

7. Key Takeaways