Most teachers' early AI use is scattered — a one-off prompt here and there, without a consistent routine. The time savings really show up once you build a repeatable weekly workflow.

A simple starting structure

  • Sunday planning session — use AI to generate starter ideas and resource drafts for the week ahead, then edit into your actual plans
  • Midweek — use AI for any ad-hoc resource or letter drafting that's come up
  • End of week — save any prompts that worked particularly well into a personal prompt library for next time

Building your own prompt library

Keep a simple running note (a document, or your school's shared drive) of prompts that reliably produced good results, organised by subject or task type. Over a term, this becomes a genuinely valuable personal resource — and one you can share with colleagues.

How this compounds over a term

The first two or three weeks of building a workflow like this often feel slower than just doing things the old way, because you're learning what works. By half-term, most teachers report the workflow has become second nature and genuinely faster than planning without it — the investment pays off, but it needs those first few weeks of deliberate practice to get there, the same way any new routine does.

Prefer it done for you? This is exactly the gap AskColin's ongoing training sessions are designed to close — structured, jargon-free sessions for teaching staff built around real tasks, not theoretical examples, so the workflow sticks from week one rather than fading out. See how it works →

Key takeaways

  • A weekly rhythm (plan, use, save) beats scattered, occasional use.
  • Keep a running prompt library — it compounds in value over a term.
  • Expect the first few weeks to feel slower; the payoff comes after that.