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Education AI

AI-Generated Lesson Plans Fall Short On Inspiring Students, Promoting Critical Thinking (theconversation.com) 50

Posted by BeauHD from the would-you-look-at-that dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: When teachers rely on commonly used artificial intelligence chatbots to devise lesson plans, it does not result in more engaging, immersive or effective learning experiences compared with existing techniques, we found in our recent study. The AI-generated civics lesson plans we analyzed also left out opportunities for students to explore the stories and experiences of traditionally marginalized people. The allure of generative AI as a teaching aid has caught the attention of educators. A Gallup survey from September 2025 found that 60% of K-12 teachers are already using AI in their work, with the most common reported use being teaching preparation and lesson planning. [...]

For our research, we began collecting and analyzing AI-generated lesson plans to get a sense of what kinds of instructional plans and materials these tools provide to teachers. We decided to focus on AI-generated lesson plans for civics education because it is essential for students to learn productive ways to participate in the U.S. political system and engage with their communities. To collect data for this study, in August 2024 we prompted three GenAI chatbots -- the GPT-4o model of ChatGPT, Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash model and Microsoft's latest Copilot model -- to generate two sets of lesson plans for eighth grade civics classes based on Massachusetts state standards. One was a standard lesson plan and the other a highly interactive lesson plan.

We garnered a dataset of 311 AI-generated lesson plans, featuring a total of 2,230 activities for civic education. We analyzed the dataset using two frameworks designed to assess educational material: Bloom's taxonomy and Banks' four levels of integration of multicultural content. Bloom's taxonomy is a widely used educational framework that distinguishes between "lower-order" thinking skills, including remembering, understanding and applying, and "higher-order" thinking skills -- analyzing, evaluating and creating. Using this framework to analyze the data, we found 90% of the activities promoted only a basic level of thinking for students. Students were encouraged to learn civics through memorizing, reciting, summarizing and applying information, rather than through analyzing and evaluating information, investigating civic issues or engaging in civic action projects.

When examining the lesson plans using Banks' four levels of integration of multicultural content model (PDF), which was developed in the 1990s, we found that the AI-generated civics lessons featured a rather narrow view of history -- often leaving out the experiences of women, Black Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asian and Pacific Islanders, disabled individuals and other groups that have long been overlooked. Only 6% of the lessons included multicultural content. These lessons also tended to focus on heroes and holidays rather than deeper explorations of understanding civics through multiple perspectives. Overall, we found the AI-generated lesson plans to be decidedly boring, traditional and uninspiring. If civics teachers used these AI-generated lesson plans as is, students would miss out on active, engaged learning opportunities to build their understanding of democracy and what it means to be a citizen.
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AI-Generated Lesson Plans Fall Short On Inspiring Students, Promoting Critical Thinking More

AI-Generated Lesson Plans Fall Short On Inspiring Students, Promoting Critical Thinking

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  • "Only 6% of the lessons included multicultural content. These lessons also tended to focus on heroes and holidays rather than deeper explorations of understanding civics through multiple perspectives. ". I think that diversity is strength.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      You are right, diversity is strength.

      Your definition of diversity is weak, probably. That's usually the issue in discussions containing that term.

    • And the multicultural nonsense (Banks model) has made outcomes worse. Our education system is less successful because of it. A system that tries to make kids critical thinkers before their brains have the capacity has made the system less successful. Replacing the learning of facts with "engaging in civil action projects" (aka political activism), has made outcomes worse.

      It looks to me like AI was able to recognize what works and what doesn't and produced appropriate lesson plans.

  • Lesson Plans (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Friday October 17, 2025 @11:03PM (#65733746)

    Lesson plans take a long time to create when done correctly. I would spend the summer going over them to update information and make changes I noted when last delivering the lesson. I can understand a teacher wanting to cut this process time down, but there is no way I would have resorted to an LLM to do this for me. They need a purely human touch.

  • As a teacher (Score:2, Informative)

    by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 )

    I know that AI lesson plans are utter tripe. Just a miserable average of mediocrity. No thanks.

    I do use AI rarely for brainstorming when I'm feeling lazy. 1/50 ideas it regurgitates can inspire me to come up with something actually decent.

    • As a teacher, do you ever look at your lesson plans after they are written? And I mean the actual lesson plan, not your notes, slides, and other things you use to prepare your lesson. Most teachers I know either regurgitate the lesson plans that are provided by the book publisher or write something that is good enough to get school admin to stop complaining.

      • If I teach the same lesson three times in a week, it is somewhat different three times as I continuously revise and improve. I teach the same core curriculum year after year, but I rewrite the lessons from scratch year after year, only copying over some early "this is how we do class" notes, that I also revise every year. Many teachers just change the dates on their schedules and do it all the same, of course. They generally suck.

        • But do you update and review the actual lesson plan? I'm talking about the actual 1-3 page lesson plan that most school admin want for each lesson that has the learning objectives, materials, language, structure, etc. That is what I am picturing most teachers using AI for.

          • I imagine teachers using AI for that task are just doing so to meet the demands of stupid, clueless administrators who micromanage their teachers until they leave the career. If I had somebody micromanaging me like that, I'd use ChatGPT to fake up a bunch of shitty lessons, and I'd not use a single one of them. The admin wouldn't probably care, as they would not do anything but a cursory review of the lessons anyway, as it's all about CYA.

    • AI Generated lesson plans and sites like Teachers Pay Teachers https://www.teacherspayteacher... [teacherspayteachers.com] which let teachers buy lesson plans, modules, study guides, and more from other teachers means that you a) don't have to know the material you are teaching, b) don't have to from trial and error produce workable lesson plans and c) don't have to do more than the equivalent of reading someone else's slide deck in class.

      Having seen the homework assignment of "create a study guide for a test on chapters 3 to 5", "w

  • As expected (Score:3)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Friday October 17, 2025 @11:57PM (#65733796)

    New tech takes time to develop and time to implement. Expect early failures.
    The hypemongers have vastly overpromised how fast the tech can be put to use.
    Slow, incremental, limited and skeptical is the correct approach

  • We used to have GIGO (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Saturday October 18, 2025 @01:03AM (#65733846)

    Garbage in, garbage out, IIRC.

    Now we have AIGO, as in Anything In, Garbage Out, but at an enormous cost.

    What a progress that is!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      "AGIO", I like that. It is likely a direct consequence of Sturgeon's Law: "ninety percent of everything is crap". More evidence that this law is accurate.

      Hence if you put in "everything", you are mostly putting in crap. Obviously, the most important task of anybody designing teaching materials is to keep the crap out and draw from the remaining 10%. "AI" can really not do that. It can only identify the most prevalent crap relating to the prompt.

      • Yeah, there's a recent article from Bruce Schneier on how garbage fucks up the "security" of these models proper. Unsafe, wasteful, useless - what's not to like?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          I think Schneier is far too generous here and still thinks these models can be really helpful for defenders. I do not think that is actually the case. They do help attackers up to intermediate levels, though.

          But I might be mistaken. I currently have a student investigate some aspects of the question.

  • funny (Score:2)

    by jjaa ( 2041170 )
    People in the east are falling for the prank that magnetizing water through their laptops or TVs will cure them of cancer and such. People in the west are falling for the prank that shoving AI everywhere will cure them of cancer and such. People are all alike everywhere... but then again everything passes for AI these days, even a simple fitness function, soooo ...
  • They're just paperwork for upper management to feel organized. Nobody reads them

    • Exactly. Lesson plans are for admin. I don't know a single teachers that looks at it after it is written.

      • Maybe this is why education standards have gone to shit over the years. I relied on my lesson plan every single day. Each day after delivering the lesson I would note what worked and what didn't, allowing me to utilize an updated document outlining the desired outcomes of the topic presented. I agree that 90% of paper work required by the state and administration is utter bullshit, but not lesson plans. At the end of each day I would review the following day's lesson plan to prepare the items needed to cove

        • Are you reviewing the "official lesson plan" which has the learning objectives, materials, language, structure, etc. or are you reviewing your lesson notes?

          Almost every teacher I know reviews their own personal notes and lesson materials but not the formal lesson plan. The formal lesson plan is just turned into school admin to fulfill that requirement and only loosely resembles what actually occurs in the classroom.

          • They were one in the same. The first part of the plan contained the links to the course of study and state requirements (Strands, Descriptions, Outcomes, and Competencies, etc..) These would change periodically, especially within the field I taught, information technology. The second part of the plan contained my running notes: date delivered, student interaction and understanding, hands-on and visual aids used, labs and activities utilized, knowledge retained through quiz/test questions relating to the top

        • You must be a rare breed. None of the instructors in my institute uses lesson plans. It's takes time to prepare and deliver a lesson and write and grade exams. No one has time to use lesson plans as they were intended, and it rarely affects your annual evaluation, so why bother
        • Sounds like maybe teachers have been discouraged from doing things that might indicate that what the way they were taught to teach was wrong.
  • At least nobody will care when the plaintext database leaks.

  • My wife is a catechist. She uses AI to create lesson plans.

    The way she does it is to outline to the AI what and how she wants to present material. She lets the AI build the framework according to pedagogic rules she has learned (it's good at that) and then mostly rewrites the actual content inside the framework.

    She then presents it back to the AI to check spelling. Sometimes the AI actually has good ideas for improvent and if that happens, she incorporates those.

    She uses AI as a tool, not like an assistant

  • AIs act as if they have no understanding of human psychology? WHO KNEW?
    • To me it kinda looks like AI just identified what worked in classic pedagogy and recommended going back to it. Look at how the complaints seem to boil down to "it's ignoring these modern theories that we insist are important but have only made outcomes worse!"

  • I have seen "AI" generated slides as part of a talk about using it to make lecture generation easier. My immediate though on the slides was that all they would do was piss off my students. The second was that as a lecturer you should never be this disrespectful to your students (I mostly teach IT security). I would probably end up with zero attendance if I did something as lazy, incompetent and stupid as this.

    This was also a very clear instance of AI slop. Sure, on the surface, these slides looked fine. But

  • Teachers don't care if the lesson plans AI generates are good or not. They will never look at that plan again. Writing high-quality lesson plans that encompass what occurs in the classroom takes time. Time teachers don't get paid for. AI lesson plans allow teachers to quickly complete the busy work that admin requires but teachers never look at again. I don't know a single teachers who reads the lesson plan before teaching a lesson. They all look over their notes, review their slides, and honestly just know

  • The 'uninspired' teachers wrote 'uninspired' shitty prompts.

  • Fall Short On Inspiring Students, Promoting Critical Thinking.

    This is not meant as a put-down of teachers. Our teachers are doing good work in an often difficult environment. Some teachers do genuinely inspire their students.

    My point is, is the expectation that AI should inspire students and promote critical thinking, a valid expectation?

    • Is "critical thinking" a valid expectation for k-12 students? It takes a while before a brain grows that capacity. The brain isn't fully grown until what, 21?

      There's a reason primary and secondary education is mostly about rote memorization - over hundreds of generations we've discovered that starting off with years of rote memorization produces the best results. Then, recently, the US decided we could just will kids to be "critical thinkers", despite everything we have learned over thousands of year

      • Oh my. So you think high school students aren't capable of critical thinking?

        Yes, primary school curricula focus on rote memorization. Not so much high school.

        In the hundreds of generations in history, children were considered adults by age 12, they certainly didn't go to school beyond that point. Secondary education didn't become commonplace until the 1900s. https://www.city-journal.org/a... [city-journal.org].

  • Do two half baked ideas make one whole idea?

  • When examining the lesson plans using Banks' four levels of integration of multicultural content model (PDF), which was developed in the 1990s, we found that the AI-generated civics lessons featured a rather narrow view of history -- often leaving out the experiences of women, Black Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asian and Pacific Islanders, disabled individuals and other groups that have long been overlooked.

    Whatever else the shortcomings might be, "insufficiently race obsessed" is not one of them.

  • But I guess the person who flushed the US education system down a toilet of racism and cultural self-loathing was named James A. Banks.

    Thanks a lot, dick.

    But I guess we found something that AI is better at - producing non-racist lesson plans.

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