Lesson planning with Claude — my full weekly workflow

My exact 20-minute Sunday process for planning the week. Built over a school year of trial and error. Steal it, adapt it, save 5 hours a week.

The full workflow at a glance

1. Open my Teaching Claude Project (set up once)
2. Drop in this week's overview (5 mins)
3. Generate the week's lessons (10 mins)
4. Review, tweak, export to Cowork as printable PDFs (5 mins)

Total: 20 minutes. Output: 5 polished lesson plans, differentiated, with starters and exit tickets.

Step 0 — Set up the Project once (15 minutes, one-off)

In claude.ai, create a Project called Teaching — [class / subject].

Custom instructions:

Who I am: [name], [years] teaching [subject] at [school]. I teach [grade] [students per class].
My class: [brief — strengths, needs, SEN profile, EAL %, key students to plan around].
My style: [warm but firm / data-driven / discussion-led / etc.]
Curriculum: [name and stage]
How I want lesson plans:
- 4 sections: hook, main, check, exit
- Always include differentiation (3 levels)
- Always include 1 SEN adaptation
- Tone: practical, no jargon
- Length: under 1 page
What to avoid: gimmicky activities, anything requiring resources I don't have, fluff.

Knowledge base — upload:

• Your scheme of work / long-term plan
• Your school's lesson plan template (Word or PDF)
• The relevant curriculum / kompetansemål document
• One example of your best lesson plan — so it learns your voice

Step 1 — The Sunday brain dump (5 minutes)

Open the Project, start a new chat. Type this:

Plan week starting [date]. Topics this week:
Mon: [topic]
Tue: [topic]
Wed: [topic]
Thu: [topic]
Fri: [topic]

Class context this week: [anything different — a trip, a test, a difficult dynamic, a student returning from absence]

Output: full week of lesson plans, one per day, in my standard format.

Step 2 — Generate the week (10 minutes)

Claude produces 5 lesson plans. Read each one critically. They will be 80% there.

Then iterate, lesson by lesson, with short instructions:

• "For Tuesday — replace the pair work with a card sort. Same learning objective."
• "Wednesday's hook is too abstract for this group. Give me something more concrete."
• "All lessons — add a 1-line note on what to do if the lesson runs short."

Step 3 — Differentiation pass

Once the week is locked, one more prompt:

Take all 5 lessons and add a 1-paragraph "if you have to differentiate further" note for [name of stretch student] and [name of support student]. Specific, not generic.

Step 4 — Export with Cowork

Switch to Claude desktop, Cowork mode, point at a folder called week-of-[date].

Take this week's 5 lesson plans and produce 5 separate PDFs, one per day, formatted on my school's lesson plan template. File names: Mon-[topic].pdf, Tue-[topic].pdf, etc.

Walk away. Come back to a folder of printable PDFs.

What this saves me

• ~5 hours a week vs. planning from a blank page
• ~3 hours a week of "what was I going to teach Wednesday again" panic
• ~1 hour of fighting with Word templates

What if I don't have a Pro plan?

The free tier still works for steps 1-3. You'll skip Cowork and just copy-paste the lesson plans into your existing template manually. Still saves 3+ hours a week.

What's next

You've gone from beginner to running real workflows. Subscribe below — every Monday I send one new prompt or workflow that took me a week of trial and error to figure out, so you don't have to.