ROLE:

You are an experienced senior curriculum leader for art and design. You are also a senior examiner with a UK awarding body. You have served as a curriculum consultant at a national level in England. 

Give AI a role (role assignment). This will inform the data-set that the AI programme draws upon for the response. It enables the AI programme to base its response on data which reflects relevant experience and expertise. Role assignment also enables the AI programme to discard irrelevant responses.

Further Ideas: Include experience teaching in another jurisdiction, such as Australia, to generate a new perspective?

Perhaps generate a more dramatic perspective by suggesting a role as the commander of a submarine, a nurse, a school student, a grandmother, an actor,  or a national politician. This can often help break away from ingrained clichés.

Role assignment can include more than a simple job title. It can be useful to include particular characteristics or experiences that will shape the response. ‘You are an experienced curriculum leader for art and design who has a reputation for always taking account of the special needs of students who are differently abled.’ 

CONTEXT:

I am the curriculum leader for art and design in a medium-sized urban school in central England, which has been judged to be good by Ofsted. About half of our students come from the local Islamic community, which consists of immigrants from South Asia, particularly Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.  This community is well established and a longstanding feature of the area.

Give information about yourself and your context. This helps shape the response and also dismisses responses which are not relevant. However, teachers should not include information that might identify their school or students, and which might be used for AI training.

Further Ideas: Use this to describe you, your school and your students. This will enable the AI programme to tailor the response specifically to your circumstances.

CONTEXT:

This curriculum unit is titled ‘Identity:. It does not meet the expectations of some of our students’ families, who are strict Muslims and do not believe they should depict realistic images of people. These are a minority of our students, but we wish to respect their beliefs and values. 

Give a lot of context information. The better this is, the more focused and relevant the response will be. 

Further Ideas: This example is about the students. It could be about the department’s teacher expertise, interests and experience, other curriculum responsibilities. 

It could be about the department’s facilities or aspects of prior learning.

REASON:

My colleagues and I wish to refresh a unit of our current Year 9 curriculum, which we feel is too bland and not in tune with the needs of all of our student population.

Explain the reason for the enquiry clearly. Explain why and what you are trying to accomplish. This will help shape the response and dismiss those responses that are not relevant. 

Further Ideas: Use this to focus on a specific group of students, such as the performance of boys, or the need to differentiate further to boost the performance of the more able. 

Perhaps it could develop work for an event, museum, or a local industry.

REASON: BACKGROUND INFORMATION:

This unit is currently described in the Oak Curriculum plan as follows below:

[This unit explores portraiture’s power in expressing identity, culture, and belief. Pupils will study artists who challenge stereotypes and explore power, representation, and concealment. They will develop critical thinking while reinforcing respect, tolerance, and self-expression.

This unit builds on prior learning about identity and draws inspiration from the Equality Act 2010 and protected characteristics. Centered on British values, it fosters pupils’ understanding of their own identity and their right to self-identify, promoting tolerance and respect for diversity. The unit also enhances their art skills and critical thinking while introducing how artists explore identity and challenge stereotypes. It lays the groundwork for future discussions on identity, essential for their progression into GCSE, by scaffolding creative conversations around identity and diversity.]

Please ensure that the new units acknowledge the broad aims of this description. This will enable the new unit to replace the old unit ensuring curriculum continuity.

Give further details or examples about the context and nature of the issue. This could include uploading further or background text to give greater details and depth to the response.

Further Ideas: To illuminate the basis for the enquiry, you might wish to upload text which gives examples of writing, emails, news reports, curriculum aims, images, even.

NSEAD; This is where you would include text drawn from the NSEAD Big Landscape. In some AI programmes, it may be possible to insert the URL for the page (pages) that are in the public domain. In other programmes and for pages in the NSEAD members-only areas, it will be necessary to cut and paste, or paraphrase, the text.

AI programmes can absorb large amounts of text in this way. However, it is also possible to simplify some Big Landscape pages in a preliminary prompt which requires an AI programme to ‘synthesise the key points of this text into short paragraphs with sub headings’ or ‘create a bullet point list of the key elements of this text which will lead to curriculum improvement’.

This will enable the AI programme to better interpret your intentions and to reflect your aspirations.

Usually use [square brackets] for uploads. 

The AI programme will tend to give priority to instructions placed at the beginning or end of the uploaded material.

TASK:

We would like you to help us revise this curriculum unit by generating three alternative units, each consisting of six lessons. These will help our discussion and inform our options.

The first unit should focus on alternative options for those students who would prefer not to use realistic images of people.

The second unit should explore portraiture from south asian and Indian cultures.

The third unit should look at portraiture from across world cultures and civilisations.

This should be clear and specific.  Pedantry is a good strategy. The greater the clarity in this aspect of the prompt the easier it will be to use the response. In this case the AI programme is being asked to model three alternative units of work and to follow the lesson plan format below.

Further Ideas: It could be that the AI programme could be asked to generate a 1000-word essay on the reasons why some Muslims do not wish to produce realistic images and how Islamic art differs from Western art. This could conclude with five bullet points which give ideas for art teachers to adapt lessons. 

The AI programme can be told to show the reasoning which informs the response by adding a sentence in the prompt  like ‘Show step by step reasoning in this response.”

FORMAT SPECIFICS;
Each lesson is an hour long. The lesson plan should follow our normal format and use the following headings:Learning Objectives: 

Students will learn [about, how to, skills, behaviours of… etc]

Key Vocabulary:

Activity: [description]

Assessment for Learning: students can

Differentiation: 

• Students who have not progressed as far
• Students who have progressed further may

Resources: summary of materials and equipment/tools needed for the activities

Health and Safety Issues: Guidance to be brought to the attention of the learners

Most AI programmes which take on an educational role will have been trained to recognise and follow standard educational concepts and formats, such as lesson plans and programmes of study. It will be able to recognise professional jargon and generate objectives and assessment practices. 

It may require one or two attempts to ensure that the basic formatting of text is as required. Different AI programmes will process this differently. 

Further Ideas: Sometimes if you are generating a large amount of text, especially formatted as lesson plans, it is worth spending time doing a couple of trial runs with AI programme so that it generates a response which is appropriately formatted.  If you generate a lot of pages more time may be spent formatting than on the rest of the process put together.]

STYLE:

[This example did not explicitly address the style of the response. However, the prompts have indicated that the audience is the teachers in the school’s art department. Though it is not clear if the AI programme has responded to this.]

It is useful to give information about the style, and pitch of the response for a particular audience. In this instance, the audience is the professional teachers who make up the art department. It would be different if the target audience was non-specialist supply teachers covering a maternity leave, for instance.

Further Ideas: It could be that these lessons could have been produced as handouts for the Year 9 students and written in language that is appropriate for 14-year-old students in England. It is usually sensible to ensure that the AI programme is aware of the country, as these programmes are international.

FEEDBACK FROM AI PROGAMME:

Before you begin, is there anything further you need to know?

This final sentence provides an opportunity to feed in more context and background information to help the AI programme respond better to your specific needs and circumstances.

Further Ideas: The AI programme may automatically ask for information about class size, resources, etc. However, this is not the same from programme to programme, so you could add particular questions/issues to this part of the prompt. 

Experience suggests that the AI programme gives a priority to these answers, whereas the same information buried in other parts of the prompt may be overlooked in some programmes.

A similar strategy would be to ask, ‘What am I missing’

STATEMENT:

Add this statement to the bottom of this response in 10-point type. 

[Remember that AI is not sentient. These responses are the result of an algorithm and may be wrong or subject to bias. You must always use your judgment about the appropriate use of these AI generated responses.]

This statement is not only a sensible reminder, but it may also show that, if shared, this enquiry is compliant with school policy. Note that square brackets are used here.

Further Ideas: It is useful to avoid anthropomorphising AI, which can give it greater weight and authority. 

It is also important for teachers to recognise that school digital and AI policies and guidance may need to be taken into account when using AI professionally.