Teaching Skills: Refining AI-Generated Teaching Materials

Description

Teachers who use AI to create materials quickly run into the same set of problems. The first draft looks fine at a glance - but the instructions are ambiguous, one of the answers does not work, the level is slightly off, or the task design misses something important. Without a clear process for catching these things, you either spend too long checking manually or you use materials you are not fully confident in. This workshop gives you a structured, repeatable way to solve that. You will learn how to build detailed quality criteria for a specific type of material - drawing on CEFR descriptors, reputable guidance from sources like the British Council, and your own sample materials - so that "good" is defined before AI produces anything. From there, you will use a Create - Check - Improve - Recheck loop to test materials against those criteria and fix problems systematically, rather than editing by instinct. The session also covers one of the trickier AI challenges: updating or differentiating existing materials without letting AI change the structure, numbering, or task types you want to keep. Ross Thorburn leads you through live examples and hands-on tasks throughout, and you will leave with a prompt pack and workflow you can use straight away. WHAT YOU WILL LEARN • Build research-informed quality criteria using CEFR descriptors, reputable sources and sample materials • Create or adapt worksheets against a detailed, specific materials requirement • Stress-test level, instructions, answers, distractors, accuracy and task design with AI • Run a Create - Check - Improve - Recheck loop to fix problems systematically • Decide which flagged issues need fixing and when teacher judgement should override the AI • Update or differentiate existing materials while keeping the structure and format intact WORKSHOP FORMAT This is a live, interactive online webinar. You will spot problems in an imperfect AI-generated worksheet before asking AI to review it, build or refine quality criteria using real sources, run a quality check and choose which results matter, and recheck a revised version to decide when the loop should stop. There is also a discussion on conflicting criteria and cases where the teacher should make the final call. It is hands-on and practical throughout. WHO SHOULD ATTEND This workshop is for English language teachers, ESL and EFL teachers, teacher trainers, academic managers, and materials writers at any career stage. It is particularly well suited to teachers who already use AI to create or adapt worksheets and want a more systematic way to judge and improve what it produces. Prerequisites: Basic familiarity with any AI chat tool such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude is assumed. WHAT YOU WILL RECEIVE • Live access to the webinar • Webinar slides PDF • Materials specification and quality-criteria prompt • Research-and-source-checking prompt • Quality-review and stress-test prompt • Iterative QA loop prompt • Format-preservation and adaptation prompt • Sample materials and QA report • Reusable prompt pack for creating, checking and revising teaching materials • Example criteria organised as must-pass, should-pass and preference checks • A reusable Create - Check - Improve - Recheck workflow Attendees will also receive a certificate of attendance which includes the number of teaching hours. This workshop is a supplemtary session from the popular online course AI for Language Teaching. "Since joining the AI course I've saved at least 2 hours every week on my lesson planning and prep. I love Ross's workshops, they are clear, easy to follow and very practical for my teaching." - J. Wong (Hong Kong) "I thought using AI would be daunting as I'm not a techy person. But after joining the course, I've been able to use AI to help plan lessons, design activities, and even make pictures for my lessons." - Matilda (Hong Kong) For the best experience, attendees should have: • a computer or ipad style device (a phone will also work) • stable internet access • a headset with microphone • a webcam Trainer: Ross Thorburn Ross started his teaching journey in 2006, teaching students of all ages in central China. Ross is passionate about using technology to improve education. He’s run online training programs for teachers in over fifty countries and used AI to evaluate the teaching quality of over 10,000 teachers. In 2020, Ross published his first book, Inside Online Language Teaching. Ross’s more recent book, Unlocking Success on the Duolingo English Test, covers strategies for success in the world’s first fully online AI powered high stakes language assessment. Ross is a tutor on the online course AI for Language Teaching.