Teachers and AI: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Chat GPT

Some days, working with young teachers makes me feel like a cranky old chef in a cooking competition, watching contestants pull frozen meals out of the microwave and call it “artisanal.” These are bright, well-intentioned people. They’ve been through the wringer—college disrupted, student teaching cut short, whole swaths of their formative years swallowed by Zoom rectangles and “You’re on mute.” But when it comes to the craft of teaching, too many are skipping what really matters: knowing your content, knowing how to teach it, and knowing your students so well you could predict their energy dips and derailments before they happen.

Instead, many teachers now outsource lesson planning. They drop a vague sentence into ChatGPT—“Generate a lesson on the Civil War for ninth graders with a Do Now and a Check for Understanding”—and out pops a 45-minute “plan” as beige and soulless as a waiting room wall. There’s no consideration for the fact that the class is last period on a Friday, or that half the students are reading three grades below level, or that the kid in the back will derail the whole thing if he gets bored in the first five minutes. Good teaching is like being an engineer and a storyteller at once: you design for forward motion, you build for the constraints, you weave meaning into the gaps. But we’re raising a generation of teachers who think “content delivery” is the job, and the job can be delegated to a chatbot.

Here’s the cruel irony: ChatGPT can be a brilliant tool, if you know how to wield it. Precision prompt engineering—feeding in not just standards but students' specific learning barriers, the class’s temperament, the timing, the prior knowledge, the spark you’re trying to ignite—is the difference between deep learning and generic dross.

We teachers need to know our kids, our content, and our community, and use that information to inform our lesson planning. In today’s classrooms, that might mean a math lesson will work best if it recognizes and nurtures Black genius. Another teacher might need an ELA lesson which honors diverse cultural traditions and meets the needs of immigrant and ELL students. AI can be used to plan a Health lesson supporting gender identity and religious expression. Art instruction can embrace neurodiversity. Social Studies activities can be planned to incorporate the arts. Students in any classroom can engage in AI-generated small group activities, stations, individual practice, or project based learning, and then can come together to share and co-create knowledge in community - IF the teacher is taught how to engineer thoughtful prompts, and learns how to review AI-generated lessons for content accuracy, meaning, manageability, and measurability.

AI, used wisely, can help us differentiate and design for both the individual and the group. We can use it to engineer active learning experiences for the variety of learners in our classrooms, while still anchoring all planning to the relationship-based, shared life of the classroom community.

AI is not going away, and neither is the need for teachers who know how to use it wisely. Just as educators in 2025 must figure out how to use AI to help students think critically and creatively, we must teach teachers to do the same: not to let the machine do the work for them, but to let it sharpen their own skills, deepen their pedagogy, and ultimately, teach them how to teach.