Lesson Plan - Transparency Document

What is AI Lesson Plans?

The Lesson Plan tool takes an educator's inputs, including class details, lesson description, lesson materials, educational standards, and lesson duration, and generates a lesson plan outline for the educator. The lesson plan outline can be edited manually, and provides AI generated suggestions for the educator to add or modify the lesson as a whole or by section. The educator can also modify the lesson using AI prompts or modifiers such as lesson format and style. 

What can AI Lesson Plans do?

Copilot can do the following

• Create Lesson Outlines – Copilot can take an educator’s inputs to create a draft lesson plan outline:

  • Class Subject, Grade Level, and Language (required)

  • Lesson Description (minimum of 20 characters): A description (or prompt) indicating what should be covered in the lesson plan and how the AI system should operate.

  • Lesson Materials (not required): Up to 3 Word or PDF files from OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, or the local device to ground the lesson plan.

  • Education Standards (not required): Up to 10 education standard strands, selected from the prebuilt list of locally recognized standards from 35 countries.

  • Lesson Duration (required): A duration between 5 and 180 minutes for the lesson.

• Provide AI powered suggestions – Copilot will provide AI powered suggestions to enhance the lesson plan for an educator to choose from:

  • 3 suggestions that will regenerate the entire lesson plan.

  • 3 suggestions lesson plan section that will add bullet points to enhance the content and topics covered in that section.

• Allow for educator modifications using AI – Using Copilot, an educator can enhance modify the entire lesson plan or regenerate it:

  • Regenerate entire lesson plan with no changes to inputs.

  • Use open text to describe the changes wanted to the lesson plan.

  • Adjust the tone of the lesson plan:

    • Instructional (default): A clear and concise lesson plan.

    • Interactive: Encourage student participation and interaction.

    • Creative: Incorporate innovative and imaginative approaches.

    • Inclusive: Addresses diverse learning needs and styles.

  • Adjust the length of the lesson plan:

    • Concise: Simple lesson plan with less bullet points and shorter descriptions. Ideal for an educator well versed in a topic looking for AI to structure the lesson plan.

    • Default: Lesson plan with average length content. Ideal for most scenarios.

    • Expanded: Lesson plan with detailed instructions for delivering in a classroom. Ideal for an educator looking for step by step guidance.

What is AI Lesson Plans intended use(s)? 

AI Lesson Plans is intended for educators to create lesson plans from prompts, existing materials, and/or educational standards.. This feature is only available to educators and educators must review and approve the generated content before it is created as a document. The feature always uses educator input for any content it generated.

What are the limitations of AI Lesson Plans? How can users minimize the impact of limitations when using the system? 

AI Lesson Plans is not grounded in factual knowledge beyond what an educator provides, and while it writes in a fluent, grammatically correct way, the content it generates can be inaccurate or inappropriate. Educators must validate and review all generated lessons to ensure accuracy and relevance.

To improve the quality of the output, educators should provide clear and detailed input, such as a well-defined lesson description, document attachments, and educational standards. The document attachment feature is optimized for text-based, and may not perform as effectively with numeric or science-focused content.

What operational factors and settings allow for effective and responsible use of AI Lesson Plans.

Effective and responsible use of AI Lesson Plans requires thoughtful implementation of operational factors and careful configuration of settings. Key considerations include:

1. Clear and Detailed Inputs

   • Provide clear descriptions and reference material to guide the AI in generating contextually relevant lesson plans.

2. Educator Review and Validation

   • Always review and validate AI-generated lesson plans to confirm accuracy, relevance, and alignment with the specific needs of the classroom and lesson.

   • Avoid over-reliance on AI; use it as a complement to human ideas, not a replacement.

3. Content Type Alignment

   • Recognize the system's limitations with numeric or highly technical/science-focused content.

4. Tone and Length Selection

   • Choose an appropriate tone and length that matches the needs of the educator.

5. Educator Training

   • Provide educators with training on how to effectively input data and interpret AI-generated outputs.

   • Share best practices for integrating AI lesson plans into teaching strategies.

Supported Languages

In general, AI lesson plans supports the following languages outputs: en-US

For other locals in English are used as input, e.g EN-UK, or EN-AU, the system will output in EN-US

The system hasn't been specifically evaluated for the wide variety of dialects and sociolects represented in English.

Generative AI models are trained using vast amounts of data, and that data is most often in English. This can sometimes result in better performance in English as compared to non-English languages. As with any deployment of generative AI models, we encourage users to be mindful of the limitations of these systems for their specific use case, and cultural and linguistic contexts.   

Microsoft is planning to add more supported languages and locals to AI Lesson Plans. This article will be updated as additional languages are supported. 

System Evaluation

AI lesson plans was evaluated through extensive manual and automated testing. More evaluation was performed over custom datasets for offensive and malicious prompts (user questions) and responses. In addition, AI lesson plans is continuously evaluated with user feedback.

The system hasn't been specifically evaluated for the wide variety of dialects and sociolects represented in English.

What should I do if I see unexpected or offensive output when using AI Lesson Plans?

If you see offensive outputs, please submit feedback in using the thumbs up/thumbs down feedback in the lesson outline so that we can improve our safeguards. Microsoft takes this challenge very seriously, and we are committed to addressing it.

How can AI Lesson Plans be disabled?

AI Lesson Plans are currently available in Classwork in Teams for Education, and Teach in the Microsoft 365 Copilot App. To disable:

• In Classwork: Follow the instructions at set up AI content recommendations in an institution.

• In Teach in the Microsoft 365 App: Teach in the Microsoft 365 App can be disabled by disabling Copilot Chat for users, as outlined in Method 2 at manage Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.

are available only to educators with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. The feature is automatically limited to these users and is not accessible to others without the required license. To learn more how to acquire a Microsoft 365 Copilot license visit Microsoft 365 AI Education Tools | Microsoft Education