How to Plan a Full Term Unit Using AI — A Guide for Australian Teachers
Unit planning is one of the most time-intensive parts of teaching. A well-built unit — one that has a coherent sequence of lessons, clear progression of skills and knowledge, and enough flexibility to respond to what students actually know — takes significant thought and time to construct from scratch.
AI is changing what's possible here. Not by replacing the thinking, but by handling the structural scaffolding that takes so long to build manually. This post walks through how to use AI to plan a full term unit, specifically using LessonCreator's Unit Planner — and what to think about at each stage.
What a good unit plan actually contains
Before getting into how AI can help, it's worth being clear about what a unit plan needs to do. A term unit plan should include:
A clear unit overview — the big idea or driving question that holds the unit together
A week-by-week sequence of lesson topics with learning intentions
Key skills and knowledge addressed in each lesson
Suggested activities for each lesson
Identification of how Australian Curriculum content descriptors map across the unit
An indication of where assessment sits in the sequence
The challenge is that building this structure from scratch for every unit takes hours. AI can't do the teaching thinking for you — but it can build the scaffold quickly so you're editing and refining rather than building from nothing.
Step 1 — Define your unit before you start
The most important input to any AI unit planning tool is a clear brief. Vague inputs produce vague outputs. Before you start, be clear on:
Your topic. Not just a subject area, but a specific teaching focus. "Year 9 History" is too broad. "The causes and consequences of World War One for Australia" is workable. "How the rule of law shapes Australian democracy" is specific enough to generate a coherent unit.
Your year level and subject. These determine which AC v9.0 content descriptors are relevant and how content and language should be pitched.
How long the unit runs. A 5-week unit and a 10-week unit have different structures. Know your term length and how many weeks you're allocating to this unit.
How many lessons per week. This determines the total number of lessons in the unit — a 10-week unit with 3 lessons per week is 30 lessons, which is a very different planning task from a 5-week unit with 2 lessons per week.
Any constraints or context. Excursions, assessment tasks, prior knowledge gaps, specific texts you want to use, topics to avoid — anything that should shape the unit structure.
The more specific your brief, the more useful the AI output.
Step 2 — Generate your unit structure
In LessonCreator's Unit Planner, you enter your unit topic, subject, year level, number of weeks, lessons per week, and any additional context. You can also select whether the unit leads to a formal assessment task — an assignment, exam, or portfolio — which shapes how the unit is sequenced.
If you want AC v9.0 alignment, you can toggle it on and select which content descriptors the unit should address. LessonCreator searches the v9.0 database and surfaces relevant descriptors for your subject and year level — you tick the ones you want to include and they're woven into the unit structure automatically.
From this brief, LessonCreator generates a full week-by-week unit outline. For each week you get a theme, a weekly outcome, and for each lesson within the week: a lesson title, learning intention, lesson focus, key content points, suggested activities, and skill descriptors.
This gives you a complete skeleton of the unit — every lesson accounted for, sequenced logically, with curriculum documentation already in place.
Step 3 — Review and edit the structure before generating resources
This is the step many teachers skip, and it's the most important one. The AI-generated structure is a starting point, not a final document. Before you generate any lesson resources, go through the unit week by week and ask:
Does the sequence make sense? Does each week build logically on the one before? Are foundational concepts introduced before complex ones? Is there enough time allocated to each major idea?
Are the learning intentions right? The AI will generate plausible learning intentions, but they need to match your actual teaching context — what your students already know, what your school's scope and sequence requires, and how you'd actually phrase it in your classroom.
Does the assessment fit? If the unit leads to an assessment task, check that the skills and knowledge assessed are genuinely taught and practised across the unit, not just introduced in the final week.
Is anything missing? AI-generated unit plans don't know about your specific school context — the excursion in Week 4, the relief teacher coverage in Week 7, the specific novel or film your faculty uses. Edit these in before you start generating resources.
In LessonCreator, you can edit any lesson directly within the unit — update the title, rewrite the learning intention, change the key content points, or add specific activities. The key content points for each lesson are particularly important to get right because they feed directly into the resources you generate in Step 4.
Step 4 — Generate resources lesson by lesson
Once you're happy with the unit structure, you can generate resources for individual lessons directly from the unit plan. Click into any lesson and select which resources you want — lesson plan, PowerPoint, worksheet, quiz, reading guide, and more.
Because LessonCreator generates from the unit context — including the unit overview, weekly theme, lesson learning intention, and key content points — the resources it creates for each lesson are coherent with the broader unit. A worksheet generated in Week 6 reflects what the unit has been building toward, not just what the Week 6 lesson title suggests.
You don't need to generate all lessons at once. Most teachers work through the unit week by week as the term progresses — generating the next week's resources on Friday afternoon or Sunday evening rather than front-loading everything at the start of term. The unit plan stays saved to your account so you can return to it at any point.
Step 5 — Share with your team
If you're part of a faculty or year level team, LessonCreator lets you share unit plans with colleagues. They get a view of the unit structure and can access the generated resources — useful for collaborative planning, team teaching, or ensuring consistency across parallel classes.
For curriculum leaders and heads of department, this creates a lightweight way to build and share whole-team unit plans without the overhead of collaborative document management.
What AI unit planning does well — and where you still need to think
AI handles the structural scaffold quickly and consistently. It produces a logical sequence, generates appropriate learning intentions for the year level, maps curriculum descriptors, and creates the documentation framework that would otherwise take hours.
What it doesn't do is make the pedagogical judgements that come from knowing your students. It doesn't know that your Year 8 class needs more time on foundational literacy before tackling a complex text. It doesn't know that the previous teacher covered half this content last year. It doesn't know that your faculty has a particular approach to assessment design.
The most effective use of AI unit planning is as a scaffold that frees you to spend your thinking time on those judgements — refining the sequence, editing learning intentions, customising key content points — rather than on building the structural document from scratch.
A practical term planning workflow
Here's how this looks in practice for a teacher starting a new term:
Week before term starts:
Create the unit in LessonCreator with your topic, year level, weeks, and lessons per week
Review and edit the generated structure — adjust learning intentions, key content, sequence
Generate Week 1 resources in full
During term, weekly:
Review the upcoming week in the unit plan
Adjust any lessons based on where students actually are
Generate resources for the following week
Mid-term:
Check unit progression against assessment requirements
Regenerate any lesson that needs significant adjustment
This workflow means you're never more than a week ahead in terms of generated resources — which is actually helpful, because you're adjusting based on real classroom data rather than plans made six weeks earlier.
Getting started
LessonCreator's Unit Planner is available to all users. Free tier accounts get 5 complete lesson packages per week — enough to work through a unit progressively across a term. LessonCreator Plus ($10 AUD/month) removes all limits for teachers who want to front-load more of the planning at the start of term.
Start at lessoncreator.com.au — no credit card required.
