Senior Secondary English Teacher — Future Ready Plan

1. 1

   Pick your next set of report comments and draft three of them in ChatGPT before writing the rest yourself

   Report-writing is your single biggest time sink; three drafts is enough to know exactly how much of the work AI can genuinely take off you.

2. 2

   Start a simple document called 'Prompts that worked' and add to it every time AI gives you something usable

   The compounding value of AI comes from reusing what works — starting from scratch each week is the mistake most teachers make.

3. 3

   Have a 20-minute conversation with a colleague already using AI in their teaching

   One honest chat with someone two steps ahead will save you months of trial and error and tell you what your department is actually doing about it.

Day to day, you're doing something that hasn't fundamentally changed in decades and won't: standing in front of a class of teenagers and pulling them into a text, a debate, an idea. Around that core sit the tasks that eat your evenings — lesson planning, drafting worksheets, writing report comments, marking essays, chasing parent emails, prepping debating rounds.

Over the next five years, most of that surrounding work gets lighter. AI will draft your worksheets, propose differentiated versions for your mixed-ability classes, summarise reading passages at different levels, and write solid first-pass report comments you refine. Marking is the interesting middle ground: AI will happily generate feedback, but the profession is rightly cautious, and you'll likely use it as a second reader rather than a marker in its own right — flagging patterns across a class, checking your comments are consistent, catching things you missed at 10pm on a Sunday.

What stays firmly yours: knowing which student needs pushing and which needs praise this week, the moment a class finally 'gets' a poem, the trust that makes a reluctant reader try again, and the professional judgement that decides what a B+ actually means. That's the job. The rest is admin — and admin is exactly what this technology is best at lifting.

These are bigger than quarterly moves. They're investments in skills, relationships, role positioning, or infrastructure that pay off across years — tied to the structural shifts in the outlook above.