Recapturing Time With Generative AI
April 2025
The life of a teacher seems to require far more than the forty-hour work week we hear so much about. Teachers arrive at school early, stay late, sacrifice their recess and lunch time to help students, and work from home giving feedback on assignments, communicating with parents, or reading a professional book. As it’s often said, we don’t work the hours; we work the job. Add to all of this the PLC process. While a well-run PLC can save teachers loads of time, getting to that point requires hard work and…well…time. And all of these draws on teacher schedules don’t even account for the most important parts of their lives. Family, friends, and passions are the things keeping our teachers grounded. We all wish that work wouldn’t detract from these priorities, and yet it does painfully often.
Across my quarter century in the field, I’ve come to see time as the hottest commodity among educators. Evidence is all around us, but I’ll hone in on one interesting metric. In all of my 15 years actively attending school board meetings and reading requests from the teacher association to the board of trustees, I never once heard teachers in my organization ask for more money. What I did hear, on repeat, is teachers asking leaders to address the leave policy. And what is leave all about? Well … it’s about time.
All of this begs the question – how can we save educators time? Where can we look to recapture this precious commodity, giving some back to our practitioners without sacrificing quality?
I drank the PLC koolaid a long time ago, and this work had a monumentally positive impact on my district, school, staff, and students. So I would never, ever suggest that we save time by reverting to the pre-PLC, every-teacher-for-him-or-herself mindset. Instead, I’ve been exploring modern tools that can launch the essential functions of a PLC forward and drop a serious dose of time back in the laps of educators.
The fancy tools I reference here spring from generative artificial intelligence (AI). To illustrate, I invite you on a thought journey with me. Imagine that your school leader has tasked your PLC team with one (or all) of the following actions:
Break a promise standard down into its component parts;
Create a learning progression based on those components, moving from simpler to more complex learning;
Design assessments, both formative and summative, to measure student mastery, along with rubrics and scoring guides;
Examine results from these assessments and determine which students struggled and which did not; and/or
Plan that second round of instruction to meet the needs of both struggling students and kids who need a challenge.
It turns out, with a little practice, we can learn to harness AI platforms to generate rough drafts of essential PLC tools like those listed above. None of the content is perfect. Far from it, in fact. But we’ve all had those moments (or hours) staring at a blank screen, not knowing exactly how to start that proficiency scale or how to write an assessment that pushes students to a higher depth of knowledge. Instead of the blank screen and four hour rubrics, a well crafted AI prompt can generate a rough draft, ready for editing, in a moment or two.
So here’s where all of this is leading … back to the most valuable commodity for educators: time. What if leaders carved out time and space, entirely dedicated to teachers dabbling with AI platforms to create the tools essential for PLC success? What if, instead of another motivational speaker or traditional staff meeting, we empowered every teacher in the room to play in the AI sandbox and generate a critical item for their PLC team?
I’ve been dabbling with AI quite a bit, exploring its ability to help launch PLC teams forward while staying focused on the right work. If you’d like to work together, check out this workshop opportunity and give me a shout. I’ve learned a lot and would be excited to share with your teams. Otherwise, I encourage school leaders to simply allocate time for some guided exploration.
In the end, dedicating time for AI investigation has some major potential. First, it can launch our collaborative teams forward, helping them overcome barriers preventing them from completing the full PLC cycle. Second, it can ultimately recapture a lot of time to focus on other important teacher and school functions, and to be more present in real life outside of work.
