Lisa McBride

I stopped working weekends. AI lesson planning made it possible.

Teaching English at a high school. For the last 8 years I have worked almost every Sunday. Planning, marking feedback, creating resources. It was just part of the job. This year I started using AI properly and I haven't worked a full Sunday since February. The biggest time saver: differentiated resources. For any given text, I used to create three versions — standard, extension, and support. Each one took an hour. Now I give Claude the text, explain my three student groups, and get three tailored worksheets in 15 minutes. I still review and tweak them, but the hard work is done. Second biggest: feedback templates. I mark essays but now I use AI to generate specific, personalised feedback for each student faster. I give it the essay, the rubric, and my assessment, and it helps me write feedback that's actually useful rather than generic. I want to be really honest: the planning is better than it used to be. Not just faster — better. Because I'm not doing it exhausted on Sunday afternoon, I'm doing it fresh during the week with AI as a thinking partner.