Lesson Planning in an Australian Context

Using AI to apply APST 3 and 4 when planning to incorporate DI and UDL effectively

Working in close collaboration with Dr Lorraine McKay, we developed a brand new conversation on Noticing: lesson planning for pre-service teachers (PSTs) at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia.

On 5th July 2024 I addressed the students at Griffith, as part of their Voices from the Field conference, to talk them through the thinking behind the new feature and its main functionalities.

Lesson planning can be demotivating for PSTs as it's sometimes seen as a time-consuming form-filling exercise (Oncevska Ager and Anderson, in press). Can we pass on to AI some of the tedium of filling in lesson planning templates in order to reduce the cognitive load for teachers and make more room for creative thinking? What if lesson planning turns into a conversation, with the AI magicking up a filled-in template at the end? In this way, AI does not take out any of the fun of the process of creation; instead, it augments teachers' thinking processes through appropriate scaffolding. Once again, we diverge from the most common uses of AI, for content creation, and use it instead for content development.

To align the lesson planning conversation as much as possible to the local context, we made Noa familiar with concepts that are particularly foregrounded on Griffith teacher education modules:

• differentiation by content, process, product and environment
• UDL (Universal design for learning) principles : Engagement, Representation and Action & Expression

Additionally, we developed an Introduction conversation so Noa can learn more about each specific user in terms of the school/class/subject they are teaching, their beliefs about education, their motivation, their teaching style, their degree of autonomy, etc. This contextual knowledge is then fed into every future conversation with Noa to make sure conversations are context-appropriate.

In my talk, I focused on the affordances of lesson planning with Noa for meeting standards 3 (Planning for and implementing effective teaching) and 4 (Creating and maintaining supportive and safe learning environments) of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST). I went about this by taking the audience through a five-step lesson planning conversation I had with Noa as if I were an Australian teacher preparing to teach inferencing to a group of young learners:

• Exploring learner background knowledge and specific needs
• Introduction to the lesson, incl. how to attract the learners' attention, what ways of working to include (individual/pair/group work), when learners are ready to move to the next stage of the lesson — all with a focus on differentiation and UDL
• Body of the lesson (same considerations as above)
• Conclusion of the lesson (same considerations as above)
• Noa's commentary on differentiation and UDL used in the lesson planning so far.

Noa automatically generates a filled-in lesson plan, drawing on the knowledge it was previously fed (subject, duration of lesson, code desriptions, WALT and WILF) and the knowledge that it helped the teacher generate through the conversation. The lesson plan is fully editable, allowing for a final round of tweaking on the part of the teacher before they print it out.

My presentation is available here