How Teachers Can Save 7 Hours Per Week
Table of Contents
TL;DR
(Instructional Guidance, Transcript, and Prompts below)
Overview
Teachers typically spend a large portion of their week on planning, grading, documentation, and preparation rather than directly interacting with students. By using AI tools strategically for common instructional and administrative tasks, teachers can realistically save 5 to 7 hours per week. That recovered time can then be reinvested into student support, collaboration, and personal well-being.
Strategy 1: Lesson Planning
AI can draft high-quality, standards-aligned lesson plans based on grade level, learning objectives, and instructional models. Once a reusable template is created, teachers only need to update key details, such as topic and learning goals. This typically saves about 1 to 2 hours per week.
Strategy 2: Grading and Feedback
AI can generate rubric-aligned, student-friendly feedback that highlights strengths and growth areas. Teachers provide the rubric criteria and a short description of student performance, and AI produces clear comments and conference notes. This can save another 1 to 2 hours each week.
Strategy 3: Differentiation and Accessibility
Because students have different readiness levels and needs, teachers often need multiple versions of an assignment or lesson. AI can quickly adapt materials for emerging, on-level, and advanced learners, reducing preparation time by about 30 to 60 minutes per week.
Strategy 4: Communication and Documentation
AI can turn raw meeting notes into professional summaries, family-friendly communications, and team updates. Teachers simply provide the notes, and AI structures them into clear sections such as key points, decisions, and action steps. This brings the total time savings to roughly 3 to 6 hours per week.
Strategy 5: Instructional Supports
AI can also help create tools such as rubrics, quizzes, and student success guides that align with learning objectives and are easy for students to understand. This adds another hour of potential savings weekly.
Total Time Saved: 7 hours
By combining these strategies, teachers can reduce planning and administrative workload by up to 7 hours each week, allowing for more meaningful student interaction and a healthier work-life balance.
Teacher Take-aways
Time, Workload, and the Capacity to Teach Well
One of the least discussed but most powerful influences on instructional quality is time. Teachers routinely balance lesson design, differentiation, assessment, communication, documentation, and classroom instruction. When a significant share of working time is consumed by clerical preparation, repetitive planning, or manual feedback processes, it becomes harder to consistently implement high-impact instructional practices.
In short, teachers often know what “good teaching” looks like, but time constraints make it difficult to do those things consistently and well. Recent research continues to show that workload pressure is closely tied to burnout, reduced instructional quality, and a decreased ability to respond to diverse learner needs.
Recovering even small amounts of time each week creates meaningful space for practices that matter most for student learning. These include refining learning objectives so they are student-friendly and measurable, designing multiple entry points into a lesson for learners at different readiness levels, checking for understanding throughout instruction, providing formative feedback that guides improvement, and communicating clearly with families and colleagues.
There are also specific tasks that teachers should do, but too often do not have sufficient time to complete thoroughly. Examples include developing differentiated versions of assignments for emerging, on-level, and advanced learners; writing individualized, growth-focused feedback aligned to rubric criteria; designing accessible materials for multilingual learners; documenting team decisions and intervention plans; and building formative assessments that align tightly to learning objectives.
These actions are not “extras.” They are the mechanisms through which instruction becomes equitable, targeted, and transparent. Research in recent years has reinforced that targeted differentiation, structured feedback, and instructional coherence are key contributors to student success, particularly in diverse and mixed-ability classrooms.
When teachers are supported in reducing redundant or low-leverage preparation and administrative tasks, they can reallocate time toward higher-value professional work: analyzing student thinking, anticipating misconceptions, building relationships, collaborating with colleagues, and refining instructional design. This shift is not about doing less. It is about doing more of what matters most for learning. Strategies that save teachers time for deep instructional work helps ensure that students receive responsive, rigorous, and humane learning experiences.
References
Pondiscio, R. (2023). The case for curriculum (Hoover Institution Essay). Hoover Institution, Stanford University. https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/05Pondiscio_CROP.pdf
Steiner, E. D., Woo, A., & Doan, S. (2023). All work and no pay: Teachers’ perceptions of their pay and hours worked: Findings from the 2023 State of the American Teacher Survey. RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-9.html
The New Teacher Project. (2025). Teachers’ time use [Literature review]. TNTP. https://tntp.org/publication/teachers-time-use/
AI Support and Use
AI should be used to reduce repetitive preparation so teachers can focus on high-impact work: responding to student thinking, building relationships, and providing meaningful feedback. Sample AI support, saving teachers hours of time per week, include the following.
- Clarify learning objectives faster. AI can help draft clear, student-friendly objectives that teachers refine for accuracy.
- Draft structured lesson plans. AI can generate lesson sequences (modeling → guided practice → independent practice), which teachers customize for their context.
- Differentiate efficiently. AI can adapt materials for emerging, on-level, and advanced learners while teachers ensure rigor and equity.
- Create quick formative checks. AI can produce aligned exit tickets and questions that teachers review and adjust.
- Support rubric-aligned feedback. AI drafts growth-focused feedback so teachers can concentrate on instructional guidance, not wording.
- Streamline communication and documentation. AI summarizes meeting notes and parent communications for teacher review.
Full Transcript and Prompts
Where You Can Find Seven More Hours
What would you do if you had an extra 5 to 7 hours per week? Well, unfortunately we cannot add extra hours to the week. But what we can do is find ways to save seven hours per week so that we can use it with our students.
Generally, teachers spend 40 to 50% of their time, almost half of their time, each week planning, grading, administration—all those things that are not actually providing instruction and interacting with students.
We’re going to find five ways. We’re going to look at five ways to save time there [planning, grading, and administrative tasks], so you can do all the stuff that you need to do with your students and still have some time and energy left over for your family.
Strategy One: Lesson Planning
So number one, popping right into it, this is the big one: lesson planning, creating lessons and units.
If we take the amount of time teachers spend per week compared to how much time it would take with AI support, we’re saving 1 to 2 hours per week. So there’s our first couple of hours per week.
There are some things we can do there: lesson plans, generating activities, adaptations, and so forth. The big one is drafting lesson plans.
So let me show you what that might look like. I know I’ve got other videos on what goes into a lesson plan, but I spent some time and really fleshed one out for you.
Sample Prompt
You are an experienced K–12 instructional coach who designs highly effective, student-centered lesson plans. Create a detailed 55-minute lesson plan using the requirements below.
Grade Level: 7th Grade
Content Area: English Language Arts
Topic: Identifying themes in short fiction
Standards Alignment: Align to a middle-school standard for literary analysis focused on identifying and supporting theme
Pedagogical Approach: Gradual Release of Responsibility model (I Do, We Do, You Do)
Class Context: Mixed-ability class with several English learners and students reading slightly below grade level
Learning Objective: By the end of the lesson, students will identify a theme in a short story and support it with at least two pieces of text evidence
Include the following in the lesson plan:
- A short, student-friendly learning objective
- Required materials
- Anticipatory set or hook (5 minutes)
- Direct instruction steps (10 minutes)
- Guided practice with teacher support (15 minutes)
- Independent practice (15 minutes)
- Closure that reinforces the learning goal (5 minutes)
- Differentiation strategies for:
- English learners
- Students who need additional support
- Students who need enrichment
- At least one formative assessment strategy and what the teacher should look for
- A brief script of key teacher directions and questions
- Examples of strong student responses
- Common misconceptions and how to address them
- Timing for each section so the total equals 55 minutes
Additional Requirements
- Use clear, simple language
- Make sure directions are student-facing where appropriate
- Build in active participation, not just lecture
- Avoid more than one page of text if possible
- End with a short teacher reflection prompt about how to adjust the lesson next time
When you are finished, format the lesson plan using clear headings and bullet points for easy reading.
All right. You’re an experienced K-12 coach. Highly effective lesson plans.
So as you’ll see on this and the upcoming ones, a lot of this is simply boilerplate, which means make yourself a template. Then just modify the details specific to the lesson or the unit. For example, grade level and content area is going to be the same. You will modify the topic. You may or may not modify the standards. You might ask the AI to identify the relevant standards. Your pedagogical approach is probably going to be the same for most, class context learning objectives. You’ll modify it, but then after that, this is all boilerplate.
Learning objectives. Materials. The instructional flow, differentiation, and on and on and on.
So you only have to spend a little bit of time upfront, and you’ve got a pretty good lesson plan.
(Just for giggles, let me go ahead and run this one. I’m not going to run them all, but I will run this one.)
If you were to create a fully fleshed-out lesson plan, or even to take one you’ve delivered in the past (because we tend to teach the same things over and over, because they worked once, and we cross our fingers that they were will work again). So how much time would you need to do that? Well, after making a few modifications to the prompt, it’s done. Can you do it that fast? That’s how we get our first 1 to 2 hours of savings per week.
All right. So that’s number one. Let’s go to number two.
Strategy 2: Grading and Feedback
Number two: grading and feedback. After you’ve done some stuff to the kids, how did they do and what do we tell them. Right. That’s kind of what this means here.
Here we’re going to save an additional 1 or 2 hours per week, which means we’re now up to 2 to 4 hours total savings throughout the week. It’s starting to add up!
Rubric-based comments. AIs make great rubrics, but then we use them, and then we have to get something back to the kids. AI can also help with that with a good prompt, for feedback and strengths and growth areas. Let me show you the prompt for rubric feedback.
Sample Prompt
You are an experienced K–12 teacher who writes clear, supportive, and specific rubric-based feedback comments for students. Using the rubric and student work description below, generate individualized feedback that is evidence-based, growth-oriented, and student-friendly.
Grade Level: 9th Grade
Content Area: English Language Arts
Assignment Type: Analytical paragraph using text evidence
Topic: Explain how a character changes over the course of a short story
Learning Objective: Students will write a clear analytical paragraph that explains character change and supports the analysis with relevant text evidence and reasoning.
Rubric Criteria (4-point scale for each):
- Claim or Topic Sentence
- 4 = Clear, focused, insightful claim
- 3 = Clear claim that addresses the question
- 2 = Claim is weak, unclear, or partially off topic
- 1 = Claim is missing or does not address the question
- Text Evidence
- 4 = Two strong, relevant quotes smoothly integrated
- 3 = Evidence is relevant but integration could improve
- 2 = Evidence is weak, inaccurate, or only loosely related
- 1 = Evidence missing or unrelated
- Explanation and Reasoning
- 4 = Thorough, logical explanation that connects evidence to claim
- 3 = Some explanation but depth or clarity is limited
- 2 = Minimal or unclear explanation
- 1 = Explanation missing
- Writing Conventions
- 4 = Few or no errors; clear and readable
- 3 = Some errors but meaning is mostly clear
- 2 = Frequent errors that distract the reader
- 1 = Errors seriously interfere with understanding
Student Performance Level for This Example:
Claim = 3
Evidence = 2
Reasoning = 2
Conventions = 3
Student Strengths (summary): The student answered the question and chose quotes that are somewhat relevant.
Areas for Growth (summary): The student needs clearer explanations and stronger connection between the evidence and the claim. Evidence selection and integration should improve.
Write the feedback using the following structure:
- One short positive opening sentence recognizing effort
- One strengths paragraph that references the rubric language
- One growth paragraph with clear next-step guidance
- One closing encouragement sentence
- Keep the tone supportive, not punitive
- Write at an accessible reading level
- Avoid restating the rubric word-for-word
- Do not mention point values in the feedback
- Keep the total length to 5–7 sentences
Also generate:
- A teacher-facing summary sentence describing this student’s overall performance
- Two short reteaching or conference suggestions for the teacher
When finished, format the response with clear headings.
Again, it’s going to be a lot of boilerplate here. What’s going to change is the assignment type and the topic and maybe the objective.
Now here I did go ahead and put the rubric in here. But if you have a rubric, which maybe AI helped you create, simply upload it. And you don’t even have to fill out that part.
And then, eventually, what did a particular student do, and what are some comments that you made about the student?
This is the part you’re going to modify per student, but then after that, what should the feedback look like.
All of this is going to be the same every single time. And that is how we save another couple of hours per week.
Strategy 3: Differentiation and Accessibility
Number three: differentiation and accessibility.
Here’s the fact: we tend to write one lesson plan when, really, we generally need 3 or 4 lesson plans per lesson. Some kids are advanced, some are struggling, some have specific needs from you.
The same plan doesn’t work for all the kids, so we need not one, but multiple or multiple versions of the same plan. Which is why we can save a lot of time by adjusting the assignment difficulty levels. And I’ve got, as before, a great prompt for you to do that again.
Sample Prompt
You are an experienced K–12 instructional coach who differentiates assignments while keeping the same learning objective for all students. Using the information below, adjust the difficulty level of the assignment so there are three versions: emerging, on-level, and advanced. Ensure the rigor remains developmentally appropriate at each level.
Grade Level: 6th Grade
Content Area: Science
Unit Topic: Weather and climate
Specific Concept Focus: How air pressure affects weather patterns
Learning Objective (all students): Students will explain how changes in air pressure are related to different types of weather.
Original Assignment Prompt (teacher-created): “Write a paragraph explaining how air pressure affects the weather. Include one example.”
Class Context: Mixed-ability group including English learners and students with IEP accommodations.
Create three differentiated versions of the assignment:
- Emerging Level (more scaffolded)
- Use simpler language
- Provide sentence frames or prompts
- Allow shorter responses
- Include guiding questions
- On-Level
- Use clear academic language appropriate for grade 6
- Require a complete paragraph
- Include at least one example
- Advanced Level (extension-oriented)
- Encourage deeper analysis or added complexity
- Require multiple examples or connections
- Invite optional real-world application
Also include the following for each level:
- Student-friendly directions
- Estimated response length
- A brief rationale explaining how the level supports the same learning goal
- One optional challenge or support strategy the teacher could add
Requirements for tone and design
- Keep language supportive and respectful
- Avoid labeling students by ability
- Focus on access, not lowering expectations
- Avoid mentioning grades or points
- Keep the full response concise and easy for a teacher to skim
Format the response using clear headings.
Mostly boilerplate. You’re going to adjust a few pieces here for the specific assignment and boilerplate, etc. And then here’s our different levels of differentiation: emerging, on level, advanced level, and some things we want for all the different levels and all the different variations of the plan.
So that is going to save us another half an hour to hour per week, bringing this up to 2.5 to 5 hours total savings.
Strategy 4: Communication and Documentation
And for communication and documentation, this is writing stuff down, submitting it, publishing it, sending it to parents. All those things. But this is one thing that we often overlook because nobody’s got time, which is meeting notes.
Sample Prompt
You are an experienced school administrator who writes clear, neutral, and objective meeting summaries. Using the meeting notes provided below, create a professional summary that is accurate, concise, and easy for educators and families to understand.
Type of Meeting: Grade-level team planning meeting
Focus Topic: Improving consistency in late-work policies and reassessment opportunities
Participants: Two English teachers, one math teacher, one counselor, one assistant principal
Audience for the Summary: Teachers who were unable to attend, and school leadership
Confidentiality Note: Do not include any student names, sensitive details, or personal opinions
Meeting Notes:
[Paste raw meeting notes here, including key ideas, decisions, suggestions, concerns, and next steps.]
Write the summary using this structure:
- Purpose of the meeting
- Key discussion points (write as short, neutral statements)
- Decisions that were made
- Action items, including who is responsible and due dates
- Open questions or topics to revisit
- Next meeting date (if discussed)
Formatting and Tone Requirements
- Write in a professional, neutral tone
- Do not add information that is not in the notes
- Do not assign blame or express opinions
- Use short paragraphs or bullet points
- Avoid jargon when possible
- Keep the reading level accessible
- Keep the summary to approximately 1 page
- Do not include student names or personal details
Also provide:
- A one-sentence executive summary at the top for quick reference
- A short email-ready version (3–5 sentences) that the meeting organizer could send to staff
When you are finished, format the response using clear headings so the document is easy to scan.
You go to a meeting; you take a bunch of notes. What do you do with them? Well, you’re probably not going to go back and look at your notes. Let’s turn them into something usable or send them home to parents. “Here are things that we are talking about.” Or maybe it’s a parent meeting you’ve had and you want to generate something.
Let’s turn that over or get some help.
From an experienced administrator or teacher, type of meeting. This gets modified. Focus topic gets modified. Who is there? Who’s going to get the document, so that you modify. The rest is boilerplate. Now one thing you’re going to have to do, you’ve got some notes, obviously provide them.
If they are typed notes, save them and upload them. If they are handwritten notes, take a picture or scan them and send that to the AI and let the AI interpret it. (If ChatGPT can read my writing, it can read anybody’s writing. Just saying. It does.)
And then a lot of our boilerplate, and finally what did that save us? Let me see. What did that save us?
All right! We’re up to 3 to 6 hours now.
Strategy 5: Instructional Supports
And our final strategy, this is stuff for you, the teacher. These are the resources that you use during the instructional delivery, the quizzes, the rubrics.
I’ve got whole videos on rubrics. Go see them. But I’ve got a different take on that or a more fully fleshed out prompt. And I’ll show you.
Sample Prompt
You are an experienced K–12 curriculum designer who writes clear, student-friendly rubrics aligned to learning objectives. Create an analytic rubric using the requirements below.
Grade Level: 5th Grade
Content Area: Social Studies
Assignment Type: Short written explanation
Topic: Explain one major cause of the American Revolution
Learning Objective: Students will clearly explain a historical cause and support it using accurate facts and details.
Standards Focus: Historical cause-and-effect explanation and use of evidence
Rubric Structure Requirements
Create an analytic rubric with 4 performance levels and 4 criteria:
- Levels should be labeled with clear descriptors such as Exemplary, Proficient, Developing, and Beginning
- Use language appropriate for 5th-grade students
- Avoid jargon and overly technical language
- Do not mention point values
Criteria to Include
- Accuracy and Understanding of Content
- Use of Historical Evidence and Details
- Clarity and Organization of Writing
- Conventions (spelling, grammar, capitalization)
For each performance level and criterion provide:
- A short description of performance
- Clear distinctions between levels
- Observable evidence of quality
- No judgmental or negative tone
Also include the following sections after the rubric:
- A brief student-friendly explanation of what “quality work” looks like
- Two “success tips” students can use while revising
- A short note to teachers explaining how the rubric supports the learning objective
Formatting Requirements
- Use clear headings
- Keep the rubric concise and scannable
- Keep descriptions to 1–2 short sentences each
- Make the rubric usable in real classrooms
Do not generate example student work.
This is going to save us up to another hour per week, bringing us up to a grand total of 7 hours of savings per week, which is amazing, frankly.
So let me just show you very quickly the rubric, the prompt.
Boilerplate at the top. What’s it about?
You’ve got some specific things that you’re going to do, and then finally all the boilerplate.
Conclusion
And now you have saved 7 hours per week that you can spend with your students, your colleagues, and your family.
I hope you found these techniques useful. Take care.