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Facilitator guide · staff development day

AI for English Teachers

Everything you need to run this course with your staff — 5 sessions, ~4 hours total.

How to run it

Run this with your English faculty as a half-day, a twilight pair, or KLA team time — the whole playbook is ~4 hours. It assumes everyone has done the flagship 'Teaching with AI' course, so don't re-teach general ethics; spend the time on English. Before you start: confirm staff can log in to the tool they'll use (NSWEduChat for general drafting, Lessio for the planning activities); ask each teacher to bring one real, de-identified artefact from their own teaching — a text extract, a marking rubric, or a set of student responses with names removed — because every activity works on genuine English work; and project the Ethical-Use Checklist, especially the line about verifying every AI-supplied quote and technique against the actual text. Capture two things across the session: a faculty agreement on where AI is and isn't permitted in your assessment schedule, and each teacher's capstone reflection for their eTAMS PD record.

Session plans

  1. 1

    Where AI actually helps in English — and where it fails

    ~45 min
    Session plan

    Open by generating a model paragraph on a text the faculty knows well, on one screen, and marking it together — let the room catch the fabricated quote or the mislabelled technique live. That single demo lands the whole module. Then have each teacher run the audit activity on a text they teach and share one 'trap' they found.

    Discussion prompts
    • Where has someone in the room already been burned by a wrong quote or a feature-spotting 'analysis'?
    • Which English tasks do we most want to hand off — and which must stay our reading?
    • What's our shared rule for an AI-supplied quotation before it reaches a kid?
    Watch for

    English teachers can split into 'it's plagiarism' versus 'it's magic'. The unifying truth is narrower and more useful: AI is a strong drafting assistant that cannot be trusted on quotation, technique or argument. Keep the demo from becoming an AI-bashing session — show a genuine win (differentiation) alongside the traps.

    Standards2.1 Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area2.5 Literacy and numeracy strategies3.4 Select and use resources
  2. 2

    Prompt craft for English — grounding RICE in the syllabus

    ~50 min
    Session plan

    Live-build one English prompt with the room — start from a vague one-liner, add Role, the syllabus anchor (pull the real focus area up on screen), the three guardrails, and the self-check, projecting the improving output each step. Then everyone hardens a prompt for a text they teach and verifies the returned quotes.

    Discussion prompts
    • Which guardrail do we most often forget — and what went wrong when we did?
    • How do we phrase the syllabus anchor so it's quick to reuse across the faculty?
    • What's one faculty prompt (e.g. a Band-descriptor exemplar generator) we could standardise?
    Watch for

    Confidence varies; pair a fluent prompter with a hesitant one. The reframe that lands: prompting is just *briefing a casual teacher clearly* — English teachers already do this. The discipline that's new is the guardrails-plus-verification loop, so make them practise it, not just admire it.

    Standards2.1 Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area2.5 Literacy and numeracy strategies6.2 Engage in professional learning
  3. 3

    Planning & resources for English with Lessio

    ~55 min
    Session plan

    A faculty-team build. Each teacher (or pair) generates a real Stage 4 or Stage 5 unit for next term in Lessio, then runs the English review-before-use checklist on it — verifying outcome codes against the NESA site and checking the text breadth. Model code-verification once on screen, then let them do their own live.

    Discussion prompts
    • Where would a wrong outcome code or a fabricated quote do the most damage in our programs?
    • Does our generated unit honour the full text breadth — visual, media, multimodal — or default to novels?
    • Could a colleague defend this unit in a registration audit?
    Watch for

    The danger is treating a polished Lessio draft as finished — stress that the text choices, conceptual line and quote-verification ARE the professional work. Watch for units that quietly skip the Australian and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander text requirements; flag the ICIP line explicitly.

    Standards2.2 Content selection and organisation2.3 Curriculum, assessment and reporting3.4 Select and use resources
  4. 4

    Assessment, feedback & integrity in English

    ~50 min
    Session plan

    Start with an integrity audit: list the faculty's current extended-response tasks and rate each 'how easily could a student outsource this to AI?' Redesign one together for visible authorship. Then each teacher generates a notification + marking guideline in Lessio and drafts one feedback frame on a de-identified response, checking the quotes.

    Discussion prompts
    • Which of our assessment tasks are most exposed to AI — and how do we redesign them for authorship?
    • Where do we sit as a faculty on permitting AI in extended responses, and how should students disclose it?
    • How specific and text-anchored are our questions — specific enough to resist outsourcing?
    Watch for

    Integrity anxiety runs hottest in English. Steer firmly away from detection toward task design — that's both NESA-aligned and actually effective. Watch for staff trusting an AI-drafted marking guideline without checking it discriminates fairly across bands; make them mark a sample against it.

    Standards2.3 Curriculum, assessment and reporting5.1 Assess student learning5.2 Provide feedback to students on their learning
  5. 5

    Capstone — build and critique a real English unit

    ~50 min
    Session plan

    Run as a longer workshop or directed time. Teachers build their connected English set in Lessio and self-assess against the Ethical-Use Checklist. Protect time for the quotation and technique audits — do one together first so the standard is shared. Collect the reflections as your evidence of a Standards-relevant PD session and the teachers' eTAMS record; consider a faculty share-back of the best unit.

    Discussion prompts
    • What's our faculty's shared standard for an AI-drafted English resource being 'ready to teach'?
    • What one rule about AI in English assessment should we adopt across the faculty from today?
    • How will we log this as PD and keep building a shared bank of verified, syllabus-anchored resources?
    Watch for

    Some will want to skip the reflection — but it's what makes this real PD and the eTAMS evidence, so protect it. Watch for fatigue at the quotation audit; reframe it as the single most valuable habit the playbook teaches. Capture the faculty rule on AI in assessment for leadership to take forward.

    Standards2.1 Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area5.1 Assess student learning6.2 Engage in professional learning

After the day

Collect each teacher's capstone artefact and reflection — that's your evidence of a Standards-relevant PD day, and theirs to log in eTAMS. Part of the whole-school Lessio programme and the 'Subject AI Playbooks' line (English first; Maths, Science, HSIE and more to follow). Assumes the flagship 'Teaching with AI' course as its base. Because NESA removed the Accredited/Elective PD categories in 2024, it counts as Standards-relevant PD with no endorsement gate — English faculties can run it in KLA team time or a staff development day.

  • Every AI-supplied quote and technique verified against the actual text before use.
  • AI analysis treated as raw material, never a model of thinking — the argument is yours.
  • No identifiable student work or data entered into general AI tools; de-identify or use a secured environment.
  • English outcomes and text requirements (including Australian and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander texts) verified against the syllabus; ICIP respected — no AI-fabricated cultural content.
  • Authorship of extended responses assured by task design and disclosure, not by 'AI detectors'.

Standards-relevant professional learning, mapped to the APST · verified against national and NSW frameworks, June 2026.