AI for Teachers

The book

Eight years into teaching seventh-grade English, Sarah Whitman was still spending Sunday evenings with a half-finished lesson plan, a pile of essays she hadn't touched since Friday, and the quiet suspicion that no amount of effort would ever actually clear the backlog. What shifted things wasn't a new time-management strategy — it was the afternoon she typed a prompt into a chatbot on a whim and got a usable, differentiated reading activity back in under five minutes. AI for Teachers is the account of everything that followed: the tools that genuinely held up in a real classroom, the ones that didn't, the prompts worth keeping, and the places where a teacher's judgment still matters more than any model's output.

What you'll learn

• Which AI tools are worth your time and how to write prompts that produce specific, classroom-ready drafts rather than hollow suggestions
• How to plan a full week of lessons — including differentiated versions — without surrendering your entire weekend to the process
• A clear-eyed method for using AI feedback on student writing, including where it saves you real time and where it misreads what a student needs
• Practical approaches to rubrics, assessments, IEP and 504 documentation, and parent communication that stay in your voice
• How to have an honest conversation with students about AI use, and how to handle suspected misuse without making accusations you cannot support
• A structured 30-day plan for folding AI into your existing routine without rebuilding everything at once

Who it's for

This book is for the teacher who pulled up an AI tool once, typed something reasonable, got something too vague to use, and walked away unconvinced. It is for anyone who already feels the weight of the workload and wants a ground-level, classroom-tested account of where these tools actually earn their place — written by someone who spent eight years in a classroom before she trusted any of it herself.