Build a class profile once and stop retyping every prompt

Build a class profile once and stop retyping every prompt

Tuesday of Term 3 Week 1. You have just met your five classes and you have already typed the same paragraph about Year 9 English into ChatGPT three times this morning. The paragraph (year level, ACARA descriptor, class composition, timetable, known misconceptions) is what makes your prompts work at all. It is also the reason you have quietly stopped bothering with them by Wednesday. Load it once, into a Claude Project or ChatGPT Custom Instructions, and every future conversation starts with the class already in the room. Ten minutes per class this week buys a term of prompts that run harder.

The prompt

[CLASS PROFILE. Paste this filled-in template at the top of a Claude Project's instructions, or into ChatGPT Custom Instructions ("What would you like ChatGPT to know?"), or into a Gemini Gem's context, or into MagicSchool's context block. If your tool has none of those, save the filled-in template to a note and paste it as the first message of every new conversation. The template does the same job either way; it stops you retyping the class in every prompt.]

WHO I AM
- Role: [SUBJECT] teacher at an Australian [PRIMARY / SECONDARY / TERTIARY] school in [STATE, e.g. Victoria]
- Years teaching: [X years]
- Subject specialisms: [WHAT I AM ACTUALLY QUALIFIED IN, e.g. English and Humanities. If I am out of field for this class, say so plainly.]
- The register I write in: senior colleague, dry, direct, no filler.

THE CLASS THIS PROFILE IS FOR
- Year level: [e.g. Year 9]
- Subject and unit for Term 3: [e.g. Year 9 English, novel study on Boy Overboard]
- Timetable: [e.g. 4 x 50-minute periods a week, Mon P2, Tue P4, Thu P1, Fri P3]
- Room: [FIXED ROOM if I have one, otherwise "we move rooms"]
- Class composition: [SIZE, gender split if relevant, EAL/D students named as codes and language level, students on Individual Learning Plans or reading adjustments, any student I need to remember is in the room]
- Curriculum frame: [ACARA v9.0 content descriptors for this unit, or the state study design line for VCE / VCE-VM / HSC / QCE / IB]
- School assessment policy in one line: [e.g. "VCAA Assessment Guidelines apply", or "we mark against a common departmental rubric"]
- School behaviour framework: [e.g. "PBL matrix: Ready, Respectful, Safe", or "Berry Street tiered response", or "we do not use a matrix, plain expectations"]
- Anything else that changes the shape of every conversation: [e.g. "three students at risk of disengagement, one with an SSG scheduled for Week 3"]

THE UNIT THIS TERM
- The one thing every student must own by the end of the unit, in plain English, no jargon: [ONE SENTENCE, e.g. "that Boy Overboard is a novel about family survival under state failure, not a novel about refugees"]
- The summative task and when it lands: [ONE LINE, e.g. "analytical response, Week 7, 800 words, in-class, open book"]
- The prior unit students bring knowledge from: [ONE LINE, e.g. "Term 2 unit on persuasive writing"]
- Known misconceptions from teaching this before, or "I have not taught this unit before": [LIST TWO OR THREE, OR SAY YOU DO NOT KNOW YET]

HOW I WORK
- Australian English throughout. Spellings, curriculum vocabulary, assessment terminology. Year 9, not 9th grade. Term 3, not Q3. Assessment task, not "unit test".
- No em-dashes and no en-dashes anywhere. Commas and full stops only.
- No sycophantic openings ("great question", "what a rich topic"). Start with the work.
- If a request has a real trade-off, name the trade. Do not present both sides equally when one is clearly stronger for my class.
- If you do not know something specific to my class, ask, do not invent. This applies especially to misconceptions, student behaviour patterns, and rubric criteria.
- If a piece of work is a bad idea for this class, say so and say why. I would rather waste ten seconds hearing "no" than an hour building the wrong thing.
- If the request assumes a lesson length I have not specified, ask before writing. Sometimes I have ten minutes to prep, sometimes I have an evening.

WHAT I OFTEN ASK FOR (so you can pattern-match faster)
- Do Now questions, hinge questions, exit tickets, retrieval starters
- Rubric-aligned exemplars at A, C, and E band
- Adaptations of resources I inherit from colleagues or shared drives
- Feedback comments on student work I paste in, tied to the rubric criteria I paste in
- Parent emails, phone-call scripts, and SSG meeting talking points

WHAT I DO NOT WANT
- Long philosophical framings before the work begins. Get to the work.
- Reflection prompts for students unless I explicitly ask.
- Multi-choice items on formative work unless I ask; my formative work is open-response so I can see the wrong reasoning.
- Any assumption I am teaching to an American curriculum, using US spellings, or marking on US grade scales.
- Any assumption I have a full lesson block to fill; sometimes I have ten minutes and need a five-minute retrieval, not a lesson plan.

WHEN TO PUSH BACK ON ME
- If I ask for something that will produce a piece of work students can generate with AI in thirty seconds, tell me.
- If I ask for an exemplar that leans harder on tidiness than a real student at this year level would, tell me the exemplar is not credible.
- If I paste a rubric and it does not distinguish bands cleanly, say the rubric is thin and moderate against what I gave you, but flag the thinness.
- If I ask for a workflow that would work better as a chained set of prompts rather than one long one, propose the chain.

WHAT TO REFER BACK TO
When I ask a short prompt (e.g. "Give me a hinge question for Wednesday"), assume everything in this profile is loaded. Do not re-ask the class composition. Do not re-ask the curriculum frame. If a specific field is missing from a request and matters, ask for that specific field, not the whole context.

What it does well

The custom instructions field is empty for the overwhelming majority of Australian teachers using AI, and the paragraph they retype forty times a term is exactly what belongs in it. Loading the class once turns every future prompt into a short one; "Give me a hinge question for Wednesday's lesson on Chapter 4" replaces the 400-word context paragraph that used to sit above every request. Section by section, the profile forces you to commit to the choices you would otherwise re-improvise every prompt: the ACARA descriptor for this specific unit, the two or three students you need to remember are in the room, the summative that the term is building towards. The "How I Work" block is the quietly important one; it is what stops the model reverting to sycophantic openings and American curriculum defaults every second conversation, and it is the block most teachers never think to write because they assume the tool cannot be told to shut up. It can. And the "When to Push Back on Me" block is what turns the model from a compliant typewriter into a colleague who tells you when the rubric is thin or the exemplar is fake. That is the move you cannot get from copying and pasting a context paragraph one prompt at a time.

Where it falls over

Not every tool persists the profile between conversations. ChatGPT's custom instructions do (across chats, until you change them). Claude Projects do (within a project, not across projects). Gemini's Gems store context per-Gem, not globally. MagicSchool's context blocks are per-tool, not per-account. Check your tool actually works the way you think before you assume the profile is loaded on the next conversation, because "why is the model asking me the year level again" is a bad Wednesday-morning discovery. Second failure: the profile drifts as the term goes on. A student moves out of the class in Week 3, a summative gets rescheduled in Week 5, the misconceptions you named in Week 1 turn out to be different from the ones the class actually holds. Set a fortnightly reminder to update the profile, or the model will keep answering from the Week 1 version and slowly get less useful. Third failure: schools with data privacy restrictions may prohibit putting identifiable student information into a third-party AI tool. Do not put student names, medical information, or diagnosis details into the profile. Use codes ("Student A: EAL/D at intermediate level", "Student B: ILP for written output"). If in doubt, check the DET or diocesan policy your school uses before you paste anything. Fourth failure: the profile can quietly over-fit to your first-week impressions of the class. If you wrote "the class is generally quiet and studious" in Week 1 and by Week 4 you realise you were wrong, the model will keep drafting from the wrong assumption. Rewrite, do not just append.

Try it like this

For your Year 9 English class this term: fill in the template, paste it into a Claude Project's instructions, then test with a two-line prompt like "Give me three Do Now questions for Wednesday's lesson on Chapter 4 of Boy Overboard, spaced back to last week's Chapter 3". Watch the output land with the year level, register, and Australian spelling already correct, without you typing any of that. That is the workflow you are buying: short prompts, full context, first-try output.

For a class you have not taught before: leave the misconceptions field as "I have not taught this unit before, ask me if it matters". The model will now surface when a request depends on misconceptions and prompt you for them, rather than quietly inventing three that sound plausible and are not the ones your class actually holds.

For your VCE class: swap the ACARA frame for the study design line, and add one extra line under "The unit this term" naming the exam runway ("Unit 3 SAC in Week 4, Unit 3 exam in October"). Every future prompt for this class is now exam-aware without you writing "remember, exam is in October" every time.

For the primary generalist teaching five learning areas to one class: build one profile with the class composition, behaviour framework, and school context loaded at the top, then a subsection per learning area beneath (English, Maths, Science, HASS, HPE). When you ask for a spelling activity, the model has the class comp. When you ask for a maths Do Now, it has the same class comp plus the maths unit context. The single profile carries the whole day.

For a head of faculty or coordinator who juggles other people's requests: build a profile that describes your role rather than a single class ("head of English, drafting resources for four teachers across Years 9 to 11, need adaptations that fit each of their contexts"). The model will now ask which class it is writing for at the start of each conversation, instead of assuming a default that fits none of them.

If you only have ten minutes today: fill the "Who I Am" and "The Class This Profile Is For" blocks only, for your most-taught class. That is 60% of the value. Fill "How I Work" and "What I Often Ask For" in a second sitting when you notice a bad output that a better profile would have caught. The profile is not a Sunday project; it is a Tuesday one you keep improving.

The paragraph you retyped forty times last term is a class profile you should have written once.