AI Sub Plans: Set Up the Folder Before You Need It

Sub plans take about an hour to write, and you write them on the morning you are least able to. That is why so many teachers come in sick instead. You can cut that hour to about 5 minutes, but only by doing 15 minutes of setup now, while you feel fine. One folder, one saved prompt, and the packet drafts itself on the morning you cannot think straight.

Here is what goes in the folder, the prompt that turns it into a guest-teacher packet, and the part you still write by hand at school.

What goes in a sub plan folder?

Five things, and none of them take long because you already have all of it:

• Your class schedule
• Your routines and procedures
• Seating notes, with nothing sensitive in them
• This unit's materials
• 2 emergency filler activities

Teachers leave the filler activities out, and then need them. A guest teacher who finishes early with 20 minutes left and nothing to run has a class that will fill the time for them.

Fifteen minutes on a decent afternoon. You are not writing anything new. You are putting things you already have in one place so that something can read them later. If you have not set up the folder Claude reads from yet, the class folder edition covers that and the student-data boundary that goes with it.

What prompt do you use for sub plans?

Save this one, so you can find it at 5 a.m. instead of writing it at 5 a.m.

What does the packet actually contain?

Four things:

• The day, hour by hour
• Your lesson, rewritten for a guest teacher instead of for you
• Behavior notes in plain language
• An end-of-day report form for the sub to fill in

The rewritten lesson is the reason this is worth doing. Your own lesson plans use shorthand that works because you are the one reading them. “Warm-up, then stations, then exit ticket” is a complete plan if you wrote it and a riddle if you did not. Rewriting your own materials for a stranger is slow, boring work, and that is the category worth handing off.

How do you know the packet is good enough?

One test: could a stranger run your room from this packet alone?

Read it once as somebody who has never met your students. Not as yourself checking whether it matches what you meant. As the person who is going to walk in and be handed it. That takes about 3 minutes and it catches almost everything.

What still has to be written by hand?

Names, accommodations, and anything sensitive stay out of the folder. That is the rule, and it does not bend because the folder is convenient. Follow your district's guidance first; where you have room to decide, keep the folder to materials and procedures.

Which means you add the human layer yourself, on paper, at school, on the day. That is a sticky note on the front of the packet, and it is 4 lines long.

My one warning

The packet will be confident about every procedure you wrote down and silent about every one you did not.

Your bathroom policy is in there because you typed it. The student who has to sit near the door is not, because that is exactly the kind of thing that stays out of the folder. Neither is the fire drill route, or the class that should not be handed scissors, or the fact that third period goes sideways if the seating chart moves.

The packet comes back looking finished: organized hour by hour, with nothing obviously missing. But a packet can be complete in format without being complete in information, and nothing in it tells you which one you are holding.

The handwritten layer decides whether the day goes well, and it is the part everybody skips, because the printed packet already looks done. Write the sticky note. It takes 90 seconds and 4 lines, and it is the only part of this a stranger could not have produced.

Next

Next edition: changing what you assign so that what a chatbot can produce is not what you are grading. Teachers keep asking whether the work can just happen in class. That is most of the answer and not all of it. If you are new here, the setup edition is where to start, and the family newsletter edition is the one before this.

What is the one thing a sub always gets wrong in your room? Reply and I may build the next example around it.