Lesson Planning with Authentic Materials and AI

A serious concern I have with education today is that it often fails to show students how the content being studied and the skills being developed in the classroom are connected to the outside world. This concern is rooted in my own career journey. Before moving into teaching, I worked in several edtech startups in roles related to marketing and business development. Those years gave me a close-up view of how learning, innovation, and problem-solving happen in professional environments outside the classroom. Real-world knowledge is messy, interconnected, and applied in ways that don’t fit neatly into a textbook. If education is to be meaningful, it must make those connections visible to students.

That’s why, instead of merely trying to connect classroom content to the outside world, my approach is often to bring the outside world into the classroom through the use of authentic materials.

Authentic material refers to resources created for real-world purposes, not specifically for teaching or testing. They were not designed with students in mind — and that’s what makes them powerful. In an ELL context, for example, this might be a menu from a restaurant, an advertisement, a short news report, or even a bus schedule. In social studies and history, authentic materials could be primary source documents, political speeches, historical maps, personal letters, photographs, or artifacts. They place students in contact with the actual voices, images, and objects of real life, requiring them to interpret and make sense of them.

My own experience as both an ELL teacher and a university professor shaped my appreciation for authentic materials. They do more than provide content — they create a bridge. They spark curiosity because students know that they are handling something real. They also build resilience, as students must wrestle with texts and artifacts that are not pre-digested for them. This develops not only subject knowledge but also broader skills: interpreting, questioning, comparing perspectives, and connecting past and present. And this prepares them for the outside world where they constantly interact with authentic materials.

Of course, authentic materials also bring challenges. They can be too complex, lengthy, or advanced for certain groups of students, especially for English language learners. This is where AI becomes a valuable partner in lesson design. With the right prompts, AI can:

• Simplify and adapt: Take a dense historical text and produce a version appropriate for different reading levels, without losing the core ideas.

• Highlight key vocabulary: Identify difficult terms and generate glossaries or example sentences to support comprehension.

• Design activities: Suggest guiding questions, graphic organizers, discussion prompts, or comprehension checks tailored to the material.

• Create extensions: Transform a short quote, photo, or artifact into a debate, role-play, creative writing task, or critical thinking question.

• Differentiate learning: Generate multiple versions of the same activity so that all students can engage meaningfully, regardless of level.

In practice, I’ve seen how this combination can work. For example, I was reading a book and stumbled upon a quote by Adam Smith, and my first thought was, “Wow, this would be such a great quote to use in my Grade 11 Modern History class.” The passage, taken from The Wealth of Nations, was long and full of 18th-century references, and at first glance, it felt impenetrable to many students. With the help of AI, I broke it into manageable steps. First, AI suggested a simplified version so students could get the gist. Then, it helped me design a sequence of activities: highlighting key phrases, unpacking historical references like “the discovery of America” and “the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope,” and guiding students to ask why these events mattered for trade, empire, and globalization. By the end, what had seemed like a distant, difficult text became a gateway into a broader conversation about how the modern world was shaped. Students not only understood Adam Smith’s point, they also practiced historical thinking skills — analyzing context, questioning language, and connecting ideas across time.

In another lesson, students curated personal artifacts for a “mini museum.” Each student brought an object from their own life — a toy, a photograph, a piece of clothing, even a receipt — and displayed it to the class. On their own, the artifacts could have been seen as just “show-and-tell,” but AI helped me transform the activity into a deeper exploration. I used it to generate reflective questions such as: “What does your artifact say about you and your identity today?” “What would a historian in 100 years learn from it?” and “What is missing from your artifact that might leave future historians with an incomplete picture?” AI also helped me design extension activities: a short reflective essay imagining their artifact in a museum catalog, or a group discussion comparing which artifacts might survive over time and which might be lost. The lesson became an authentic way for students to experience how historians work with material culture — and how personal stories connect to broader historical narratives.

Using authentic materials supported by AI allows us to achieve the best of both worlds: we maintain the richness, unpredictability, and real-world relevance of authentic sources, while also providing the scaffolding needed for students to succeed. In this way, lessons are not only more engaging but also more meaningful — they prepare students to see themselves as thinkers, interpreters, and participants in the wider world, not just learners in a classroom.