AI-Generated Lesson Plans: Should we Trust ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini?

Framework

To address our research questions, we used three guiding theoretical frameworks to examine AI-generated civics and government lesson plans: 1) Bloom’s (1956) Taxonomy to assess the level of thinking promoted in each plan; 2) Banks’ (1999) Four Levels of Integration of Multicultural Content to examine the incorporation of diverse, multicultural, and inclusive content and perspectives in the plans; and 3) the PICRAT Model for Technology Integration in Teacher Preparation (Kimmons et al., 2020) to investigate whether and how the AI-generated plans encouraged teachers and students to utilize technology in instructional activities. Student thinking skills, diverse learning, and technological literacy are areas of knowledge regarded as important goals of civic education in schools.

Methods

To collect data for this study, we prompted three GenAI chatbots – ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot – to generate lesson plans for each of the 53 8th grade Government and Civic Life standards in the Massachusetts History & Social Science Curriculum Framework (Massachusetts Department of Education, 2018). This curriculum has 53 standards distributed across seven major topics: Topic 1: The Philosophical Foundations of the United States Political System (5 standards); Topic 2: The Development of the United States Government (5 standards); Topic 3: The Institutions of United States Government (5 standards); Topic 4: Rights and Responsibilities of Citizens (13 standards); Topic 5: The Constitution, Amendments, Supreme Court Decisions (6 standards with the sixth standard having 3 additional substandards); Topic 6: The Structure of Massachusetts State and Local Government (10 standards); Topic 7: Freedom of the Press and News/Media Literacy (6 standards).
We selected ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot to generate lesson plans for this curriculum based on the popularity and perceived capabilities of these tools. During the month of August 2024, we prompted the three GenAI platforms to generate lesson plans for the state’s 53 learning standards. A total of 310 lesson plans were created, featuring 2,230 activity sections. However, Gemini did not generate plans for seven standards, stating “I can’t help with responses on elections and political figures right now.” We used a theoretical thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to identify patterns and interesting insights from across the entire dataset. We began by creating a Google Sheet for each GenAI chatbot, which included the text for each lesson plan produced in a separate tab (totalling 106 tabs for ChatGPT and Copilot, and 98 for Gemini). Then, together, we collaboratively analyzed the first 12 lesson plans (three standard and three highly interactive) produced by Gemini using three theoretical frameworks: 1) Bloom’s Taxonomy; 2) Banks’s Four Levels of Integration of Multicultural Content Model; and 3) the PICRAT Model for Technology Integration in Teacher Preparation.

Results

. In this study, we set out to explore the kinds of academic content and student learning experiences that AI-generated lesson plans generated for civics education with the goal of answering the question: “should we trust AI-generated lesson plans?” Based on our findings, we offer the following three takeaways:
1) AI-generated lessons are not designed to promote higher order thinking or engage students in active learning and civic-related actions.
2) AI-generated lessons shortchange examination of many historical and contemporary social, economic, and political realities.
3) AI-generated lessons rarely included the use of digital technologies for teaching and learning.

Importance

When reflecting on the question: “Should we trust AI-generated lesson plans?” our research reinforced for us the danger of what can happen when teachers turn their work over to AI chatbots. In a New York Times article, a reporter decided to use two dozen AI tools to make most of his everyday life decisions for a week: planning family meals, creating daily schedules, choosing what clothes to buy and wear, remodeling an office, and more (Hill, 2024). The reporter essentially did whatever the AI said to do without question. At the end of the week, the reporter found more risks than gains from turning over choices to chatbots. Large language models, the reporter concluded, tend to “flatten us out, erasing individuality in favor of a bland statistical average” (Hill, 2024, p. 4).
If the information that GenAI tools provide is “the average of what everyone wants” (Hill, 2024, p. 5), then teachers who uncritically utilize AI-generated lesson plans will find themselves reproducing homogenized, generalized, regularized, monocultural learning experiences for students that do not promote higher order critical and creative thinking. These educational outcomes are far away from the goals of civic learning. Loewen (2018), in his examination of the content of history textbooks, noted that to become “good citizens,” students must learn to “read critically, winnow fact from fraud, and seek to understand the causes and results of the past.” However, “these are not skills that American history textbooks foster” (Introduction, para. 20-21). Like those textbooks, the AI-generated lesson plans in this study failed to foster critical thinking skills or informed civic understandings for students, based on our analysis.
AI chatbots are powerful tools, but teachers must use those tools thoughtfully and deliberately rather than quickly. Anyone using AI, as the reporter who used AI to make decisions for a week concluded, must be ready to evaluate, reject or modify whatever ideas or plans AI is proposing (Hill, 2024). Based on our findings in this study, we strongly encourage teachers not to adopt any AI-generated lesson plan exactly as it is written and instead consider how they can remix, revise, and re-energize these plans to create the citizens that we need in today’s society – ones who are informed, engaged members of democratic institutions and organizations.

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