Plan the whole term in one afternoon.

Term 4 is short on real teaching time. Before any AI tool gets involved, put every fixed date on one page. The AI can only plan around what you tell it, and this is the part only you know.

Work through your school calendar, your department or year-level calendar and your reporting timeline. Mark:

• Report deadlines. When comments are due, when proofreading happens, and when reports go home.
• Assessments and moderation. Common tasks, due dates and any moderation meetings.
• End-of-year events. Concerts, carols, graduations, excursions, carnivals, orientation and transition days, class placement meetings.
• Lost lessons. Staff PD, camps, incursions and anything else that takes a lesson away.

Then count your real teaching weeks. In many schools the last week or two fill up with end-of-year events, so aim to finish new content before then.

Write in the start date of each week from your own school calendar, since term dates differ between states and sectors. Scroll the table sideways on a phone.

Generic prompts get generic plans. Start the chat with a context block: who you teach, what your class needs, how much time you really have, and the curriculum content you're teaching this term. Copy that content from your curriculum documents yourself.

Use your own curriculum authority's documents. That's the official text for your state or territory, or the Australian Curriculum. In Western Australia, for example, it's the Western Australian Curriculum from the School Curriculum and Standards Authority (SCSA): the K-10 Outline, or the WACE syllabus for Years 11 and 12.

Why paste it in? AI tools don't reliably know the current version of your curriculum. They can mix up versions, states and year levels, and they can invent curriculum codes that look real. With the official text in the chat, the tool plans from what you gave it, and you can check its work against the same text.

I'm a teacher planning Term 4. Here is my context. Use it for everything I ask in this chat.

About me: I teach [subject or learning area] to [year level] at a [type of school, e.g. metro public primary school] in [state].

About my class: [number] students. [A general description with no names or identifying details, e.g. a wide range of reading levels, several students learning English as an additional language, a few working well above year level.]

Time: Term 4 has [number] real teaching weeks once events are removed. I see this class [number] times a week for [length] minutes. Key dates: [paste from your term map].

Curriculum: Below are the content descriptions and achievement standard I'm teaching this term, copied from my curriculum documents. Treat this text as the only curriculum reference. Don't add curriculum codes, content or outcomes that aren't in it. If something is unclear, ask me before you write.

[paste the curriculum text]

Style: Plain language and Australian spelling. Practical activities that work in a normal classroom with [resources, e.g. shared laptops, no specialist equipment].

Now the AI starts saving you time. Ask for a week-by-week outline that fits the weeks you actually have, with anything uncertain flagged for you to check.

Using my context, draft a unit outline for [topic] across [number] weeks.

Include:
1. Three to five learning intentions, in student-friendly language
2. The key knowledge and skills for each week
3. One main assessment task and the week it happens
4. Common misconceptions students bring to this topic
5. How the unit connects to what students learnt earlier this year: [brief note]

Show it as a table with one row per week. Mark anything you're unsure about with [CHECK]. Keep the last [number] weeks light for end-of-year events.

Plan the first two or three weeks in detail and keep the rest as an outline. Plans change once the term starts, and detailed lessons for week 9 tend to go stale by week 3. Come back and run this step again mid-term.

Break weeks [1 to 3] of the unit outline into lessons. I have [number] lessons a week of [length] minutes.

For each lesson, give me:
- Learning intention and success criteria
- A short starter
- The main activity, with timings
- A quick check for understanding
- Resources I need to prepare

Keep activities realistic for my classroom and vary the activity types across the week.

Pick the two or three tasks that matter most this term and make three versions of each. Same learning intention, different ways in.

Here is a key task from lesson [number]:
[paste the task]

Write three versions:
- Support: the same learning intention with more scaffolding, e.g. a worked example, sentence starters, or the task broken into smaller steps
- Core: the task as written, with clearer instructions
- Extend: the same concept with deeper thinking, such as analysing, applying it somewhere new or justifying an answer. Keep the number of questions close to the core version.

Keep all three versions similar in layout so no student feels singled out. Don't label the levels on the student copy.

A rubric built from the achievement standard makes marking faster and gives students something concrete to aim at.

Build a rubric for this assessment task:
[paste the task]

Criteria: [list the criteria, taken from the achievement standard in my context]
Levels: [number] levels, labelled [your school's scale, e.g. A to E]

Write each descriptor in plain language a [year level] student could use to check their own work. If you use a word like "detailed" or "sophisticated", say what it looks like in this task. Add a student-friendly checklist version underneath.

Last step: put every assessment on the term map so marking is spread out and finished well before report comments are due.

Here is my term map:
[paste weeks, events and deadlines]

Here are my assessment tasks for all my classes this term:
[list each task, the class, and roughly how long marking takes]

Build an assessment calendar that:
- Keeps marking to no more than [number] tasks in any one week
- Finishes all marking at least [number] days before my report deadline of [date]
- Avoids the weeks with [events]

Show it as a week-by-week table and flag any clashes or tight spots.

Use the AI tool your school or system has approved, and follow its policy on AI use. School-managed accounts often come with stronger data protections than personal ones. If you're planning on a personal account, check its data settings, including whether your chats can be used to train the company's models.

• One chat per unit. The tool remembers your context within a chat. If answers start to drift, open a new chat and paste your context block again.
• Ask for changes in plain words. "Shorter." "More hands-on." "Less teacher talk." No special phrasing needed.
• Push back. If something looks wrong, say so and ask for another go. Then check the new version too.
• Keep what works. Save your context block, outline and rubric in one document. Next term you start from there, and it gets faster every time.
• No approved tool yet? The term map, the checks and the assessment calendar all work on paper. Ask your leadership team which tool is approved, or send them the note in your kit.