Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The
University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
Lesson planning is the foundation of good instruction. The process establishes the objective(s) of each lesson, the sequence of activities to enable students to reach the objective, the materials that they and the teacher will need while carrying out the activities, and how the teacher will assess the students’ attainment of the objective. Lesson planning is time consuming, especially for novice teachers for whom the process is not well established.
There is a suite of lesson planning resources, including experienced colleagues, members of subject or grade level specialist associations within teachers’ associations, commercially available lesson plans, and more. The development of chatbots like ChatGPT that I have written about in earlier blogs will proliferate and provide another source that teachers can call upon to initiate the lesson planning process.
I used ChatGPT to generate lessons for a variety of subjects. The output provided a credible starting point for lesson development. The bot generates plans in a useful format. It provides a title for the lesson, specifies the objective, suggests an introduction, outlines instructional procedures and materials required, details the students’ guided practice, makes provision for independent practice and lesson closure, and identifies an assessment strategy.
The lesson introductions are functional if a bit pedestrian. They often entail asking students what they know about the concept or topic. An attentive teacher would note what the students know and do not know about the topic or concept, paying special attention to the misconceptions and misunderstandings that the students reveal that must be corrected if the students are to achieve the lesson objective.
The instructional suggestions will include examples if the bot is asked to provide them. This is especially useful because it is very hard for teachers to generate multiple examples during a lesson.
I asked the bot to produce
several plans.
- a plan [level unspecified] detailing the theme, character development, and plot of the novel Charlotte's Web with examples.
- a plan for grade 9 general science on the difference between respiration and evaporation, including at least three examples of each.
- a plan [grade level not specified] comparing the American, French, and Russian revolutions with three examples of each similarity or difference.
- a grade 11 plan about F.R. Scott's poem “W.L.M.K” showing the allusions to King’s tenure as Prime Minister with specific examples.
- a plan for grade 10 on the similarities and the differences between a revolution and a coup d’état incorporating at least five specific examples of both.
Like the plans colleagues provide or the ones that are commercially available, the plans from the bot are imperfect. It is a good idea to check the accuracy of the examples, and, for that matter, the other information contained in the lesson. “Garbage in, garbage out” may be too strong an indictment of my requests but, in fairness to the bot, the accuracy of the bot’s replies might have been better if I had been more precise about my requests.
Notwithstanding its
limitations and mine, the output produced by the bot provided a useful starting
point for developing a lesson plan. Evaluate it yourself. You
might want to submit a few variations on the same request to see what the bot
produces.