Teaching with AI: from your own workflow to the classroom

AI is now part of every teacher's working week, and part of how students research, write, and think. Used well, it buys back time and opens up lessons. Used carelessly, it produces the kind of generic, slightly-off output that has become known as AI slop: content that looks fine but adds little, and sometimes actively misleads. The difference is almost entirely down to how it is used, and that starts with the teacher. So the morning works in thirds: two on your own practice, one on your classroom.

The first third is your toolkit. Richard walks you through the current AI tools landscape for teachers, how to choose between them for different jobs, and the prompting habits that consistently produce useful work rather than slop, drawing on his own day-to-day use across DP Geography, ESS, and TOK planning.

The second third is your workflows, putting those habits to work where they give back the most time: preparing lessons faster without losing your voice, brainstorming and developing ideas with AI as a thinking partner, and getting on top of comments, reports, and communications in ways that stay personal rather than templated.

The final third turns to your classroom and what changes when students have AI too: the lesson types it changes most, approaches that put students in the driving seat rather than reducing them to passengers, teaching in a way that preserves academic integrity rather than chasing AI-written assignments, and what data protection actually looks like when students log into AI tools. It is all grounded in real lesson examples that have worked across DP Geography, ESS, and TOK.

Leave with a practical AI toolkit, workflows that give you back time and brain space across the week, and a clear sense of where the lines need to be with your students.