Turn tomorrow's lesson plan into a CRT-ready sub plan

Turn tomorrow's lesson plan into a CRT-ready sub plan

You wake up at 5.42am on Thursday of Term 3 Week 1, throat sandpapered, temperature climbing, and the calculation begins. Ring in sick and write a sub plan from bed, or drag yourself in and spend the day breathing on Year 9. Most teachers pick option B because option A takes forty minutes of typing you do not have. The reason it takes forty minutes is not that you do not know the plan. You know the plan. You planned it. The forty minutes is translating the plan into instructions a stranger can execute in your room without you standing next to them.

Have Claude or ChatGPT do the translation.

The prompt

[Paste tomorrow's lesson plan in whatever form it exists. Bullet points are fine. If it lives in your head, dot-point it in three minutes: what class, what topic, what activities, what you have to hand.]

You are helping me convert my lesson plan into a plan that a casual relief teacher (CRT in Victoria, casual in NSW, supply in QLD) can pick up and actually run, without me being there.

CONTEXT
- Year level: [YEAR LEVEL]
- Subject: [SUBJECT]
- Lesson length: [MINUTES]
- Room: [ROOM NUMBER, or note it changes]
- Class size: [ROUGH NUMBER]
- What a stranger walking in cold needs to know about this class in one sentence: [ONE SENTENCE, honest. e.g. "three students will try to leave the room in the first ten minutes; the rest are settled."]
- What the CRT will have access to: [PICK: my laptop logged in / no laptop / just the whiteboard / a class set of iPads / textbooks in the cupboard]
- Anything I am legally or professionally required to include (school sub-plan template lines, medical alerts flagged in the class list, evacuation notes): [PASTE IT IN, or write "none I am aware of"]

DO THIS
1. Rewrite the plan as a minute-by-minute script the CRT can follow, from the moment they walk in the room to the moment they hand over. Include timings.
2. For every activity, say what "done" looks like, so the CRT knows when to move on.
3. Give me a five-line briefing note to leave on top of the pile: what the class is like, the one behaviour thing they need to hold, who to send to sick bay if it comes up, and what to do with any student who finishes early.
4. Write a two-line note the CRT can read to the class in the first minute, from me, addressed to the class. Not "your teacher is unwell today" energy. Something that lands.
5. Flag any activity in my plan that will not work without me and swap it for one that will. Say what you swapped and why.

Keep the whole thing on one page. If a CRT has to scroll or search, they will not use it.

What it does well

The prompt does the one job the sub plan sits unwritten for: turning a plan you already have in your head into a plan a stranger can execute without asking you a question you cannot answer because you are asleep with a temperature. The minute-by-minute script is what casuals actually want and rarely get; most sub notes read "Chapter 5 comprehension questions" and end there. Step 5 (flagging what will not work without you and swapping it out) is the honest bit. The activity that runs beautifully when you are in the room, because you are running it, is not the activity a stranger should try to run. Naming that in advance is what stops the lesson unravelling by the twelve-minute mark.

Where it falls over

The prompt cannot manage the relationships you have with the class, so it cannot tell the CRT that Student X responds to being asked, calmly, to move seats, but escalates the moment anyone raises their voice. That kind of specific relational knowledge is what makes your classroom work and it is exactly what a sub plan struggles to transfer. Add the specifics yourself in the "one sentence" line, or write a longer "known students" note if it matters. Second failure: the model will happily generate a plan for a class it has never seen. If your class is different from the median, and it usually is, you still have to sanity-check the plan against the actual room. Third failure: if your school has a policy that CRT plans must live in a specific template or shared drive, the prompt does not know that unless you paste the template in. Do that once and save it. Fourth failure: do not paste student names, medical information, or identifying details into a third-party AI tool without checking your school's data policy first. Use codes (Student A, Student B) and describe the behaviour, not the person.

Try it like this

• If you are already planning to be out (professional learning day, family thing, appointment): run the prompt on Tuesday, print the output, leave it in the tray. That is a different quality of sub plan than the one you write in the taxi rank.
• For a class with a tricky student: add a bullet under CONTEXT: "Student A: keep them in the room, do not send them out except for X". The CRT gets specific guidance rather than the generic behaviour-management advice sub plans usually degrade into.
• If you have three minutes and a fever: skip the class-specific context, run steps 1 and 2 only. A minute-by-minute script with a done-condition per activity beats a paragraph of vague instructions every time.

The version of you that wakes up sick tomorrow will not have forty minutes for this. The version of you reading this on Thursday morning does. Draft the CONTEXT block once for each of your regular classes, save them in a note on your phone, and next time it is thirty seconds of paste and a fresh lesson plan on top.