Follow the Prompts: Using AI for Curriculum Design
Jun 03, 2026
Are you are Year 7 teacher with a classroom of extreme literacy achievements. For instance, you have a smallish group of students who, for various reasons, are very weak readers and another group of extremely able students? Then, perhaps even most worryingly, a large bunch of indifferent achievers who are great socialisers (i.e. you can't get them to be quiet).
That describes my Year 7 class in 2025!
Well for the last six months I've been streaming linking our Curriculum 4-Phase Workflow™. If I had that class today, this is what I would do with the help of AI. From there, I would bring my plans to my learning team and see what they think of my repurposing of curriculum materials to meet those extreme needs.
Instead, dear reader, why don't you act as my learning team and check out my curriculum design tricks which, together with Generative AI, I think help me meet the complex needs of that classroom.
Background to my big idea.
I’ve been using Dr Seuss texts in my teaching programmes over the years with much delight. From time to time, I've even turned their use into a readers theatre. I know it's not rocket science. Dr Seuss stories are deceptively complex and there is nothing quite like them for revising phonological awareness.
So my plan is to create a readers theatre festival for that targets reading fluency in which Years 7 students learn use Dr Seuss texts to entertain early childhood audiences of K-2 students.
I’m mindful that the past success of the setting up a readers theatre festival is a good way to reinforcing learning intentions through a ‘social contract’. In so doing, I create an open-ended opportunity for all students to make progress by presenting before a real audience. And because the target audience is from early childhood, I'm banking on the fact that as Year 7s they will not feel as daunted as they would presenting to their peers and older age groups.
Doing school work with a community building flavour
At the same time, I want the festival to be organised as a real unit of work and not just a 'fun project'. It will be organised to culminate in a summative task that counts towards the students' semester report. It will holds a variety of formative assessments which students can view as stepping stones towards that. On the other hand, it will target the concept of rehearsals and rehearsing for a public event as a major strategy to practice skills, including thinking, comprehension and writing routines.
My bottom-line is, firstly, a ‘minimal viable curriculum’ that enables every student to improve through my explicit teaching of literacy knowledge, understandings and skills. Secondly, I want to be able to guarantee that I have given each student the opportunity to see how their achievements (against the common standards) does, in fact, have a social consequence.
Lastly, perhaps most challenging of all, I want students to be mindful on identifying ways in which they have improved by fully participating in the unit. This will be crucial for the way in which I want them to use rubrics throughout the unit.
What to expect next.
I've done some preliminary work on the unit to get started. For instance, I'm intending to plan a seven-week programme of 4 lessons x 45 minutes each week. I have also gone through the process once with my Generative AI platform (Google Gemini) to come up with the following structure for the unit.
Consequently, I hope to share a few tips I've already picked up allow the way as I back track my design process with you. Here's the iterative process I'm planning to illustrate for the unit's design. Catch you in the next blog with an outline of how I work through Phase 1: Assemble the AI Workspace.
Dear Principals & Curriculum Leaders
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