ChatGPT Prompts for Teachers: Lesson Plans, Feedback, and Admin
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ChatGPT prompts for teachers are worth writing down properly, because the same handful of jobs comes back every single week: plan the lesson, differentiate the task, mark the stack of work, send the parent message you do not want to get wrong, and clear the admin that eats your Sunday. Typing each request from scratch is the part that wastes your evening. Write them once as fill-in templates and prep starts with filling three blanks instead of staring at an empty chat box.
The five templates below follow a teacher's week rather than a subject, so they work whether you teach Year 4 or A-level chemistry. Each leaves blanks for the parts that change: the topic, the year group, the work you paste in. If the placeholder syntax is new to you, see how fill-in variables work.
1. The lesson planner
Most lesson plan prompts fail because they ask for "a lesson on photosynthesis" and get a generic worksheet. Give the model your constraints and your standard:
Plan a [text: lesson length] lesson on [text: topic] for [text: year group or grade]. Include: one learning objective in student friendly language, a five minute hook, two activities with timings, and a check for understanding at the end. The standard I must cover: [textarea: paste the curriculum standard]
Pasting the actual standard is what separates a usable plan from filler. It also means the objective comes back in language you can put on the board.
2. The differentiator
You rarely need a new task. You need the task you already have, at three levels:
Here is a task I already use: [textarea: paste the task]. Rewrite it at three levels: one with scaffolding for students who need support, one at grade level, and one extension for students who finish early. Keep the same core skill in all three so I can run them in the same room. Subject: [text: subject]
The instruction to keep the core skill constant is the important one. Without it you get three different lessons instead of three entry points into one.
3. The feedback drafter
Marking is where the hours go, and it is the job where a template pays back fastest:
You are marking [text: assignment type] for [text: year group or grade]. Rubric: [textarea: paste your rubric]. Student work: [textarea: paste the work]. Return: two specific strengths quoting the work, one priority target for improvement, and one sentence I can say to the student in class. Tone: [dropdown: encouraging, neutral, formal]
Anonymise before you paste. Strip names and anything identifying, and check your school's policy on putting student work into a third party tool. The prompt drafts the feedback; the professional judgement about whether it is fair stays with you.
4. The parent message
The message you rewrite four times is the one worth templating:
Draft [dropdown: an email, a phone call script, a report comment] to a parent. The situation: [textarea: what has happened and what I need them to know]. Goal: [dropdown: share good news, raise a concern, request a meeting, follow up after a meeting]. Keep it under [dropdown: 100, 150, 250] words, warm but specific, no jargon, and end with one clear next step.
Forcing a word limit and a single next step is what stops these drifting into the vague paragraph that gets a vague reply.
5. The admin unblocker
Most of the rest of the week is turning one document into another shape:
Turn this into [dropdown: a rubric, a student friendly checklist, a parent letter, a slide outline]: [textarea: paste the source document]. Audience: [text: who will read it]. Length: [dropdown: half a page, one page, two pages]
One template covers the trip letter, the rubric, the revision checklist, and the cover work you have to leave at 7am.
Build it once, use it all year
The pattern under all five is the one in the 5-part prompt framework: give the model a role, the task, your material, and the output format, then leave blanks for whatever changes. For a teacher, the blanks are almost always the topic, the year group, and the thing you paste in.
Five templates is also roughly the right number to start with. If you want to go further, the 20 prompts that cover 80% of your work shows how a small library beats a big folder of half-remembered chats. And when your students start asking how to use AI without outsourcing their thinking, the study prompts here are written to hand straight to them.
You can build all five in the prompt builder in about fifteen minutes, or start from ready-made teaching prompts in the Prompt Library and adapt the wording to your classes. Either way, save them with their blanks. A template you fill in is a two minute job; a prompt you retype from memory quietly stops getting used by week three.
One last thing worth saying plainly: ChatGPT is confidently wrong often enough that you should check every fact, date, and worked example before it reaches a student. Use these prompts to skip the blank page, not the professional judgement.
Tags: Templates, Teachers