When teachers depend on commonly used artificial intelligence chatbots to develop lesson plans, it doesn’t end in more engaging, immersive, or effective learning experiences in comparison with existing techniques, as we present in our study current study. The AI-generated civics lesson plans we analyzed also unnoticed opportunities for college students to explore the stories and experiences of traditionally marginalized people.
The appeal of generative AI as a teaching tool has caught the eye of educators. This was the results of a Gallup poll from September 2025 60% of K-12 teachers already use AI of their workwith probably the most commonly reported use being lesson preparation and lesson planning.
Without the support of AI, teachers could spend hours each week designing lessons for his or her students. With AI, time stretched Teachers can create detailed lesson plans with learning objectives, materials, activities, assessments, extension activities and homework in seconds.
However, generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot weren’t originally designed for educators. Instead, these tools were trained on massive amounts of text and media, largely sourced from across the web, after which launched as general-purpose chatbots.
As we began to make use of these tools in our practice as educators, we found that they often produced teaching materials and lessons that reflected the “recite and remember” model of traditional education. This model will be helpful for memorizing basic facts, but often fails to interact students within the energetic learning crucial to grow to be informed residents. We wondered if teachers should use these general-purpose chatbots to arrange for lessons.
For our researchWe began collecting and analyzing AI-generated lesson plans to get a way of what kinds of lesson plans and materials these tools offer teachers. We selected to concentrate on AI-generated civics lesson plans because it will be important for college students to learn productive ways to take part in the U.S. political system and have interaction with their communities.
To collect data for this study, in August 2024 we directed three GenAI chatbots—ChatGPT's GPT-4o model, Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash model, and Microft's latest Copilot model—to create two sets of lesson plans for eighth-grade civics classes based on Massachusetts state standards. One was an ordinary lesson plan and the opposite was a highly interactive lesson plan.
We compiled a dataset of 311 AI-generated lesson plans with a complete of two,230 civic education activities. We analyzed the information set using two frameworks developed for evaluating educational materials: Bloom's taxonomy and Banks' 4 levels of multicultural content integration.
Bloom's taxonomy is a widely used educational framework that distinguishes between “lower-order” pondering skills, including remembering, understanding, and applying, and “higher-order” pondering skills—analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Using this framework to research the information, we found that 90% of the activities only taught students basic pondering skills. Students were encouraged to learn civics through memorizing, reciting, summarizing, and applying information, somewhat than through analyzing and evaluating information, examining civic problems, or engaging in civic motion projects.
When checking the lesson plans with The banks' four-stage integration model for multicultural contentdeveloped within the Nineteen Nineties, we found that AI-generated civics lessons included a somewhat narrow view of history—often ignoring the experiences of ladies, Black Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asian and Pacific Islanders, individuals with disabilities, and other groups which have long been ignored. Only 6% of lessons contained multicultural content. These lessons also focused on heroes and holidays somewhat than deeper explorations of understanding civics from multiple perspectives.
Overall, we found the AI-generated lesson plans to be downright boring, traditional, and uninspiring. If civics teachers were to make use of these AI-generated lesson plans as is, students would miss out on energetic, engaged learning opportunities to develop their understanding of democracy and what it means to be a citizen.
Why it matters
Teachers can attempt to adapt lesson plans to their situation through prompts, but ultimately generative AI tools don't take actual students or real classroom environments under consideration like a teacher might.
Although designed to look that way as in the event that they understand users and have interaction in dialogue with them, from a technical perspective, chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot are machines that predict the following word in a sequence based on massive amounts of ingested text.
When teachers use these tools to arrange lessons, they risk counting on technologies that should not designed to boost, support, or enhance teaching and learning. Instead, we see that these tools produce step-by-step, one-size-fits-all solutions, while education requires the other – flexibility, personalization and student-centered learning.
What's next?
While our study found that there’s a lack of AI-generated lesson plans in lots of areas, that doesn't mean teachers shouldn't use these tools to arrange for lessons. A teacher could use generative AI technologies to advance their pondering. In the AI-generated lesson plans we analyzed, there have been just a few interesting activities and stimulating ideas, especially throughout the homework suggestions. We would recommend teachers use these tools to enhance their lesson planning process somewhat than automating it.
By understanding that AI tools lack the flexibility to think or understand context, teachers can change the way in which they interact with these tools. Instead of writing easy, short prompts—“Design a lesson plan for the Constitutional Convention”—they might write detailed prompts that include contextual information in addition to proven frameworks, models, and teaching methods. A greater prompt could be: “Design a Constitutional Convention lesson plan for eighth grade students in Massachusetts that features a minimum of three activities on the evaluation or creation level of Bloom's Taxonomy. Be sure to incorporate hidden stories and untold stories, in addition to civic engagement activities on the social motion level of Banks' 4 levels of multicultural content integration.” integrate.”
Our study highlights the necessity for teachers to make use of AI-generated instruction critically somewhat than quickly adopting it. AI isn’t a whole solution tailored to the needs of teachers and students. Ultimately, more research and skilled development opportunities for teachers are needed to explore whether and the way AI could improve teaching and learning.
