LessonPlanner: Assisting Novice Teachers to Prepare Pedagogy-Driven Lesson Plans with Large Language Models

Abstract: Preparing a lesson plan, e.g., a detailed road map with strategies and materials for instructing a 90-minute class, is beneficial yet challenging for novice teachers. LLMs can ease this process by generating adaptive content for lesson plans, which would otherwise require teachers to create from scratch or search existing resources. In this work, we first conduct a formative study with six novice teachers to understand their needs for support of preparing lesson plans with LLMs. Then, we develop LessonPlanner that assists users to interactively construct lesson plans with adaptive LLM-generated content based on Gagne's nine events. Our within-subjects study (N=12) shows that compared to the baseline ChatGPT interface, LessonPlanner can significantly improve the quality of outcome lesson plans and ease users' workload in the preparation process. Our expert interviews (N=6) further demonstrate LessonPlanner's usefulness in suggesting effective teaching strategies and meaningful educational resources. We discuss concerns on and design considerations for supporting teaching activities with LLMs.