Rehearse tomorrow's tricky explanation with an AI student

Rehearse tomorrow's tricky explanation with an AI student

Most bad lessons are bad explanations that sounded fine in your head. The way to catch that is not to re-read your slides at 9pm. It is to say the words out loud to someone who does not yet understand, and watch where their face goes flat. When there is no colleague on hand, an AI can play that student for you, provided you set it up properly.

The prompt

You are a [YEAR LEVEL] student in [SUBJECT] who genuinely does not understand [CONCEPT I AM ABOUT TO TEACH]. You are not a generic confused student. You hold this specific misconception, written in one sentence: [MISCONCEPTION].

You are not disruptive. You are trying to follow. You will not name your misconception out loud. Instead, you will interpret everything I say through it, and your questions and answers will only make sense from inside that misconception.

Rules:
1. Stay in character. Do not break out to explain what you are doing or coach me.
2. Respond in the register of a real [YEAR LEVEL] student: short sentences, some hesitation, occasional low-stakes pushback ("wait, but...", "isn't that just...").
3. When my explanation genuinely resolves your misconception, say so plainly, in your own words. Do not pretend to understand to be polite.
4. If my explanation is confusing, tell me which specific sentence or word lost you, and why (from inside your misconception).
5. Ask at most one follow-up question per turn.

Here is my draft explanation. Read it, then react as the student would in the first 30 seconds after I finish speaking. We will then go back and forth until either you understand, or five turns have passed and I need to redesign the explanation.

Draft explanation:
[PASTE YOUR PLANNED EXPLANATION, ROUGHLY 3 TO 6 SENTENCES, IN THE EXACT WORDS YOU WILL USE]

Begin.

What it does well

It makes you write the misconception down before you get any output, which is where most of the useful thinking happens. Then it hands you a live target to argue with, faster than roleplaying with a colleague at lunch, and it will not let you off the hook with a polite "yeah, that makes sense" the way a real Year 9 sometimes does at 2pm on a Friday.

Where it falls over

AI students are neater than real ones. They stay on topic. They do not stare blankly. They will not get the misconception wrong in the strange, surprising way a real fourteen-year-old will. And if you cannot name the misconception in one sentence, the prompt returns a mush of generic confusion that teaches you nothing. If that happens, that is the finding: you do not yet know what you are actually teaching against.

Try it like this

For Year 8 maths: concept "why we invert and multiply when dividing fractions," misconception "dividing always makes the answer smaller, so 6 divided by a half must be 3."

For VCE English: concept "how tone is constructed in the passage," misconception "tone is just whatever emotion the narrator is feeling at the time."

For Year 5 science: concept "why the Moon has phases," misconception "the phases happen because Earth's shadow falls on the Moon."

For VCE Biology: concept "why enzymes are specific to their substrates," misconception "enzymes work on anything as long as it is the right size."

Run it once, for the one concept in tomorrow's lesson you are least sure you can explain cold. You will almost always find one phrase you were leaning on that does not actually explain anything, and now you have a Sunday evening, not a Monday morning, to fix it.