The #PhysEd Newsletter: How I'm Using AI To Stay Sane As A PE Teacher

Hey Reader!

I hope you're well and that your week's off to a great start!

After a few weeks of school, I can officially say that the start of the school year has been pretty wild for me. In addition to teaching 8 sections of P-2 physical education, I'm teaching three sections of Grade 4 Core French and one section of Grade 7 French Immersion Healthy Living.

My schedule is intense, and on top of that, in my physical education program, I teach three separate grades, and each grade is tackling its own unit at the moment.

All of this means that there are a lot of moving parts to my day. Not to mention that I also play musical classrooms between:

teaching in the gym
teaching outside
teaching upstairs in my classroom
taking kids out to the woods
teaching out front of the school because of Picture Day

It's just very, very hectic.

That said, there are a couple of AI habits that I've developed that have made the start of the school year actually feel smoother than any other year since I've started teaching at KCA. Last week, I tried something new called the Daily Brief, but to understand how that works, you first have to understand how I'm using AI in my lesson planning and reflection right now.

I just want to give you a heads-up that the rest of this newsletter is going to be AI-heavy. That said, while I use Claude for most of my AI needs, these workflows would work just as well on ChatGPT or Gemini.

Planning with Claude

All of my program planning, unit planning, and lesson planning happen in a project within my Claude account.

If you're a #PhysEdU member, then you've seen snippets of it before. I use Claude to think out loud, break down outcomes, develop learning roadmaps, put together workbooks and grade books, and create artifacts for units and lesson plans.

What this has done for me is it has allowed me to teach Claude how I think about teaching, and because of that, the AI has gotten really good at predicting how I would go about different aspects of my planning.

It also means that Claude, within this self-contained project, has a very deep understanding about my PE program. It knows where I'm heading, understands my calendar, has access to all of my roadmaps, and knows what I've taught and what I haven't taught yet.

Within Claude, I've created skills, which are comprehensive and repeatable prompts that break down how I go about certain aspects of my teaching. I use these skills on a daily basis in my planning. I have skills for almost all repeatable aspects of my teaching, from building learning roadmaps to designing lessons, to outlining games and activities, to putting together sub plans, etc.

It's important to note here that the goal is never to offload completely all aspects of my teaching. Instead, the goal is to remove a lot of the busy work and as much friction as possible so that I'm able to think out loud about teaching and maintain my creativity, my focus, and my attention while I go about planning meaningful, engaging learning opportunities for my students.

Even within the skills that I've developed in Claude, I ask it to check in with me at different parts to ask my opinion, because I still want to maintain a sense of autonomy and competence as I go about building meaningful tools and aspects of my physical education program.

All this to say that Claude has an inside-out understanding of my teaching, of my program, of what's taking place in my lessons, and where my focus areas are.

Daily Field Notes

When I was in university, I remember my supervisors and cooperating teachers really pushing for the idea of post-lesson reflections. This meant sitting down after each lesson that I taught, with a red pen, going over all the aspects of my lesson, and thinking aloud about the things that happened.

I'm not going to lie, I always felt best when I did this. However, if you have spent any time teaching, you'll know that your day is so hectic and busy that there's very little time to actually achieve this (not to mention achieving it in a system that can then be used to inform your future planning). AI has changed a lot of that. Again, Claude and Wispr Flow, my preferred AI-powered dictation app, have brought post-lesson reflections back to the forefront and made them into something that I look forward to creating and that actively informs my teaching every day.

In Claude, I built a Field Notes skill. At the end of the day, I tell Claude I'd like to record my field notes for the day, and it asks me about how each lesson went. I then use Wispr Flow to talk about my lessons. This is stream-of-consciousness talking, saying everything that went down and everything I thought about the lesson, without trying to organize my thinking or dealing with the friction of having to write it out. I do this for every lesson throughout the day and anything else that happened during the day, such as things that happened during recess supervision or during a staff meeting. At the end, when I have completed the field note, Claude generates two documents for me:

A reflection document that will get added to my reflection workbook
An ideas document for any ideas that came out of my teaching for that day, whether they be ideas for resources that I can develop, tools that I could be building for my teaching, or content ideas that I can share on #PhysEdU

At the end of the week, Claude generates all of this into a weekly recap, and that gets added into a master document for my reflections for the school year.

The Daily Brief

Now, here's where everything becomes very useful. As I mentioned, my teaching reality is very hectic: I'm running back and forth between grades, between subject matters, between teaching areas, and between lessons and units. Because of this, it is very easy to get confused as to what I'm actually teaching to each class as they walk in.

In an ideal world, all of my lessons, all of my classes would be following the same order, and I would know exactly what I'm teaching, but that's not how teaching actually works. Sometimes lessons bellyflop. Sometimes groups miss a whole day of lessons. Sometimes there's a day off of school, so a few classes fall behind in the unit. It's just hard to know where it is.

If ever you've caught yourself asking students, "Hey, did we do this last class?" then you know exactly what I'm talking about.

This is where the daily brief skill comes into play. Because Claude has an understanding of everything I'm teaching and because it knows everything that happened over the past week through the Field Notes skill, each morning I go into Claude and I ask it to generate a daily brief. What that daily brief is, is an image that Claude generates as a PNG and that I put onto my phone. In this image, it shows me:

the classes that I'm teaching that day
what happened last class
any flags or things that I need to be aware of that might be carrying over from the previous lesson
what my lessons will be that day for each class, based off of where the class is at in their unit and based off of what happened in the last class

The brief shows me where each class is in their unit based off the total amount of lessons that are planned for it. It gives me the what, why, and how for that day. It reminds me what the main activity is and the main teaching cues. It gives me look-fors for assessment and any other important notes that I may have based off of what happened in the last classes.

Basically, it becomes a second brain that helps me make sure that I'm making informed decisions and going into every lesson feeling highly prepared despite my wild teaching schedule.

See It In Action

On October 1st, I'm going to be hosting a live session on #PhysEdU where I'm going to showcase all of the work that I've done in Claude this year.

This will be an unpolished, very real look at what the AI side of my teaching looks like, and it will get recorded and added to the workshop space, which is available to all Pro members.

AI is moving so fast, and the ways I'm finding to integrate it into my teaching are constantly evolving. That said, I'm doing my absolute best on #PhysEdU to share and showcase how I'm leveraging AI to get the most out of my teaching and to feel great as a teacher (a.k.a. avoiding soul-crushing overwhelm).

#PhysEdU memberships start at just $10/year at the Community Tier. You can learn more about membership tiers and what they unlock here.

I hope you found some inspiration in this week's newsletter! I really appreciate you helping get the word out by sharing it with your PE teacher besties!

Happy Teaching!

Joey

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