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.

Worth knowing: 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.