My husband is a data scientist, so I’ve been hearing about AI and ChatGPT a lot over the past year. When I listened to him share his experiences using this generative AI tool, I—like many other educators—wasn’t sure how we should be using it. Educator and researcher Donna Shrum was encouraged to try out AI in her teaching practice by her colleagues. She wrote about her positive experience using it to give immediate feedback during a writing workshop in an opinion piece in Education Week (Ferlazzo, 2025).

So, I was trying to stay open-minded—but I still had reservations.

Then, a couple of months ago, my husband mentioned that he had used ChatGPT to practice difficult conversations he was going to have with colleagues. I was immediately intrigued. As a math coach, I regularly engage in tough conversations as teachers make sense of new initiatives and strategies to try in their classrooms. The idea of using AI to support and perhaps improve my coaching practice really got me thinking: What are ways I could use ChatGPT to become a better coach and to better support the teachers I work with?

Writing Unit Plans

This past year, I worked in a middle school that was transitioning into an International Baccalaureate (IB) program. The program has a lot of specific vocabulary teachers are expected to include in unit plans. I noticed that teachers were spending so much time trying to get the wording right that they weren’t focusing enough on the activities, flow, and goals of the unit. I decided to see if and how ChatGPT could offer support.

I was working with a 6th-grade teacher writing a unit on ratios and rates and I asked her what she believed were the big ideas of the unit. She shared that equivalence and scaling were high on her list. We entered the following prompt into ChatGPT:

“We need a conceptual statement for an IB Middle Year Program (MYP) Year 1 math unit on ratios and rates. The big ideas are equivalence and scaling. We are using Illustrative Mathematics (IM) 6th Grade Accelerated Unit 2 but not the percentage problems.”

It gave us:

“Understanding ratios and rates helps us describe relationships between quantities, make comparisons, and solve problems through the principles of equivalence and scaling. By exploring how quantities grow or shrink proportionally, we can recognize patterns, interpret real-world situations, and communicate mathematical thinking using multiple representations.”

The ChatGPT response also asked if we wanted help generating related concepts, global context, or a statement of inquiry.

It was exciting to see how quickly this response was generated and that the follow-up questions showed alignment to IB (identifying related concepts, global context, and statements of inquiry were the next parts of the unit template we were going to complete). I asked the teacher how she felt about the statement. She felt it leaned too heavily on proportional reasoning and, given that this was to be the first unit students would see on ratios and rates, didn’t emphasize introducing or comparing ratios. So we entered the following:

“This is a good start. This is the first unit students will see on ratios. We want the conceptual statement to focus on building an understanding of ratios/rates and comparing them. While there is some proportional thinking in the unit, we don’t even use that language yet.”

ChatGPT responded with:

“Ratios and rates help us describe and compare relationships between quantities. By exploring how quantities relate to each other through equivalence and scaling, we begin to build a foundation for reasoning about situations in the world around us.”

Refining our prompt resulted in a response that felt much better to the teacher. We then discussed related concepts and global context. Once she had selected some related concepts and a global context, we asked ChatGPT:

“What related concepts and global contexts would you use for this conceptual statement?”

We compared what ChatGPT suggested to what we had chosen and discussed the differences. It was a rich conversation—the teacher even said that she had never thought so deeply about the ideas behind a unit. And all of this took about ten minutes. This first experience using AI in my coaching sold me on its potential. Instead of worrying about perfect wording, we were talking about the big ideas in the content.

Data from a recent Gallup poll on how teachers are using AI found that six in ten teachers used AI tools this past school year (Gecker, 2025). Dr. Debdas Mondal (2025) conducted a study looking at trends of AI use in K–12 classrooms. Of the 200 teachers he surveyed, 120 used AI-based learning platforms, 90 used automated grading tools, 85 used virtual teaching assistants, and 100 used adaptive learning systems. These tools are mostly student-centered and not so focused on the planning aspects of our jobs. As coaches, we need to model how to use AI as a thinking partner, so it becomes a tool that supports meaningful learning in the classroom.

Supporting Lesson Planning

After that initial success, I tried again—this time with a 9th-grade algebra team planning. The team had been using the IM curriculum for two years. While they had come to appreciate the curriculum, they still wanted students to have more in-class practice time. We decided to designate Fridays for students to practice the skills from each week’s lesson that aligned with the Algebra Regents Exam (New York State’s high school subject test).

I wondered how ChatGPT might support planning these Friday skills days. I asked:

“We teach Algebra to 9th graders in New York City using the IM curriculum. We want to use Fridays as an opportunity for students to practice skills using Algebra Regents questions. If we have done Lessons 12–15 from IM Algebra Unit 2, can you give 5 multiple choice and 10 open response Regents-style questions that cover these topics?”

It gave us a list. While the questions seemed useful and similar in tone to Regents questions, they didn’t match the actual topics in Lessons 12–15, which focused on solving systems of equations by graphing, substitution, and elimination.

So I gave more specific feedback:

“I really like these questions, but Lessons 12–15 from IM Algebra Unit 2 are on solving systems of equations using graphing, substitution, and elimination. Can you write 5 multiple choice and 10 open response questions using NY Algebra Regents language?”

ChatGPT returned a different set of questions. Some of the responses are below.

Although questions were more aligned to the content, they still didn’t fully reflect Regents language or structure. I asked again:

“I really like these questions for practicing solving systems of equations, but they don’t really sound like questions from the Regents. Are you able to find NY Algebra Regents questions on systems of equations?”

It gave us a new set. Some of those questions are below.

References

Ferlazzo, L. (2025, June 18). AI can save teachers time and stress. Here’s how. Education Week.

Gecker, J. (2025, June 25). How ChatGPT and other AI tools are changing the teaching profession. AP News.

Mondal, D.(2025, August 12). Emerging trends of AI integration in classroom education. SSRN.

The contents of this blog post were developed under a grant from the Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0