Curriculum Design with AI.
Designing rigorous, ethical, and student-centred learning. This is a hands-on curriculum-design lab, not a lecture about AI. Participants leave with a completed unit, ready to teach on Monday.
By the end, participants will be able to:
- Use AI to accelerate curriculum planning while maintaining professional judgment.
- Design learning experiences aligned with standards or competencies.
- Create authentic assessments that reduce opportunities for inappropriate AI use.
- Develop differentiated lessons more efficiently.
- Build reusable AI workflows for planning.
The agenda
The curriculum designer's role in the AI era
How planning has changed. Common challenges: lack of planning time, increasing differentiation, assessment redesign, curriculum overload, AI-generated student work. Participants list the three curriculum tasks they spend the most time on.
What AI does well
Demonstration: AI excels at brainstorming, organizing ideas, generating examples, creating scaffolds, and producing multiple versions. AI does not replace teacher expertise, curriculum knowledge, assessment judgment, or relationships.
Backward design with AI
From standards → objectives → assessment → lessons → activities, reframed as standards → teacher prompt → AI draft → teacher revision → final curriculum. AI becomes a planning assistant, not the planner.
Designing better assessments
From essay → AI writes it → teacher struggles, toward reading → discussion → reflection → presentation → written response → conference. Participants redesign one assessment from their own classroom.
Building an entire unit
Each participant brings one curriculum unit and uses AI to create essential questions, learning goals, vocabulary, success criteria, daily lessons, differentiation, homework, assessment, and a rubric. Everyone leaves with an almost-complete unit.
Backward design, reframed
Learning Standards → Learning Objectives → Assessment → Lessons → Activities becomes Learning Standards → Teacher Prompt → AI Draft → Teacher Revision → Final Curriculum.
Sample demonstration prompts
A participant teaching Grade 10 Spanish might start here:
Or a Grade 9 Biology teacher planning an ecosystems unit:
Take-home prompt library
Many AI workshops show teachers how to generate worksheets or lesson plans. This workshop focuses on instructional design: using AI to improve coherence, alignment, differentiation, and assessment while preserving teacher expertise and professional judgment. Participants see complete planning workflows, not isolated prompts.
Ethics discussion
- When should AI not be used?
- How much editing makes AI-generated material genuinely yours?
- Can AI reinforce bias in curriculum?
- How do we maintain teacher voice?
- How do we preserve authentic learning?
Take-home toolkit
- 100 AI prompts for curriculum design
- A unit planning template
- A lesson planning template
- A standards-to-assessment mapping tool
- An assessment redesign checklist
- A differentiation prompt library
- A rubric generator guide
- An AI ethics checklist
- A one-page Teacher Decision Framework for reviewing AI-generated content
Follow-up
Within one week, participants receive a digital prompt library with updated examples, editable planning templates, a recording (if delivered online), and a one-hour optional group Q&A to discuss implementation.