The lesson-planning work order

After school on Monday, a Primary 5 English Language teacher stares at her screen: "Last week I asked for reading comprehension and the format was perfect. Today the same sentence gave me summary questions." She scrolls back — both times she typed "Give me five P5 reading comprehension items." The model is not unstable. The sentence leaves too many blanks — item type, passage length, grammar already taught — and the model fills them differently each run.

When the same instruction works one day and fails the next, the prompt is usually a work order with only a title: the recipient knows "reading", but not what shape to hand back. This is lesson 2, building on lesson 1's "clarity beats length", and it turns a prompt into a lesson-planning work order you can tick field by field: recipient setup, procedure, field intel, delivery spec, red lines — not a chant, a checklist.

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What the five fields do

School office work orders name who is responsible, what to do, background, what to return and what must not happen. AI cannot hear your verbal add-ons. The fuller the work order, the less it has to guess.

• Recipient setup: Who the output is for and which professional register the model should use. "Planning assistant for a Hong Kong primary English Language teacher" beats "world-leading education expert", because the latter is not a register.
• Procedure: One action, one verb. "Design five reading-comprehension items" works; "design, mark and write the letter home" needs three separate prompts.
• Field intel: Information only you hold — year level, unit, learning focus, already taught / not yet taught, class profile. This field often decides whether output can go straight to pupils.
• Delivery spec: Countable and checkable. "Five items, four options on one line each, answers plus one sentence on what each item tests" — not "be more detailed".
• Red lines: Language and terminology, flag uncertain facts for verification, do not rewrite student work — three lines worth repeating almost every time.

When a field is blank, the model fills it — with whatever looks most like the internet's average answer, not necessarily what you wanted.

Where the blanks come from

"Give me five reading comprehension items" forces the model to decide: narrative or expository passage? main idea or inference? Primary 5 or Secondary 1 vocabulary? Each run may choose differently, so output drifts. The work order exists so you fill those blanks yourself.

Already taught / not yet taught is the core of field intel

Many teachers stop at year level and subject and omit boundaries. For a Secondary 2 Science lab report, if you do not write "control variables taught, error analysis not yet taught", the model may suddenly ask for standard deviation. State the boundary and difficulty stays inside your pacing. That single sentence often lifts usable output from half to nearly all of it.

Three classroom scenarios

Primary 5 English Language reading

The teacher's revised prompt will run close to identically next week:

Recipient setup: you are a reading-item assistant for a Hong Kong primary English Language teacher, familiar with the local primary curriculum.
Procedure: design five reading-comprehension items for Primary 5 unit "Community helpers".
Field intel: Primary 5. Students know simple past and Wh- questions; passive voice not yet taught. Passage 120–150 words on community workers (e.g. firefighter, social worker). Class of 30, about seven need extra vocabulary support.
Delivery spec: one English passage, then five multiple-choice items; label each item type (main idea / detail / inference / word meaning / tone); options on one line; answer key at the end with one sentence per item on what it tests.
Red lines: vocabulary within Primary 5 range; no specific salaries or full names of real organisations; mark uncertain facts "teacher to verify"; do not rewrite any passage for students.

Secondary 2 Science lab sheet

Recipient setup: you are a lab-design assistant for a Hong Kong secondary Integrated Science teacher, familiar with junior HKDSE-style writing.
Procedure: design a pupil-facing worksheet for an inquiry on factors affecting dissolving rate (no teacher answer key).
Field intel: Secondary 2. Students know control variables, fair testing and record tables; error analysis and uncertainty not yet taught. 40-minute lab, groups of four, eight groups; two groups need a simplified step sequence.
Delivery spec: six blocks — (1) inquiry question (2) hypothesis (3) equipment list (4) steps, one per line, 6–8 steps (5) record table with column headers (6) three safety reminders. Plus a "simplified steps" version: one instruction per step, four steps total.
Red lines: use only concepts already taught; do not require standard deviation; chemical names as in the textbook; mark uncertain safety data "teacher to verify".

Secondary 4 Citizenship and Social Development argument prep

Write the prompt in Chinese when the deliverable is a Chinese lesson plan; write the whole prompt in English when the deliverable is English reading material, to avoid distortion at the language switch.

Recipient setup: you are a planning assistant for a Hong Kong secondary Citizenship and Social Development teacher, familiar with DSE assessment patterns.
Procedure: design a set of debate-prep prompts for Secondary 4 unit "Public health and society".
Field intel: Secondary 4. Students can judge source reliability and are learning to analyse policy pros and cons from multiple angles. Class of 32 in four groups; three weak in written expression.
Delivery spec: one controversial issue (50-character background max), three pro arguments, three con arguments, each with "data type needed" (statistics / case / expert view), plus one teacher follow-up that pushes from description to evaluation.
Red lines: no named political figures or unverified epidemic figures; Hong Kong curriculum terminology; mark uncertain facts "teacher to verify"; do not write full argumentative essays for students.

Work-order skeleton

Recipient setup: you are a [assistant type] for a Hong Kong [primary / secondary] [subject] teacher.
Procedure: [one verb plus one deliverable].
Field intel: [year level], unit "[name]", learning focus: [list]. Already taught: [prior]. Not yet taught: [boundary]. Class profile: [size, ability, SEN].
Delivery spec: [layout], [count], each item contains [fields or elements].
Red lines: Hong Kong English and local curriculum terminology; mark uncertain facts "teacher to verify"; if student work is involved, suggest only — do not rewrite wholesale.

Where people drift off course

• Inflated recipient setup. "World-leading" is not a register — use region, phase, subject and assistant type. Self-check: delete recipient setup and run again; if tone barely changes, the field is too empty.
• Two or three verbs in procedure. "Design, mark and summarise" thins all three. Split into three prompts or number separate blocks in delivery spec. Self-check: can procedure be summarised with one verb? If not, split.
• Field intel stops at year level. Add "already taught / not yet taught" and compare usable output. Self-check: could another teacher in your panel guess your pacing from the prompt? If not, intel is thin.
• Delivery spec as adjectives. "More professional" is not executable — use "five items, four lines each, with answers". Self-check: can someone count how many deliverables from delivery spec alone? If not, sharpen it.

Try it once

Time: 10–15 minutes.

Do this: Pick a unit you are teaching this week. Write a full prompt using the work-order skeleton. Run once with "not yet taught" deliberately blank, then add the boundary and run again.

Hand in: Both outputs plus one sentence on what unwanted content disappeared after you added the boundary (for example an out-of-scope formula or vocabulary).

You got it right when: the second output matches your class pacing and you can point to which sentences in the prompt map to each of the five fields — the work order has become a checking habit, not just a long paragraph.

With the work order stable, lesson 3 locks layout and register with examples. To fix the work order as a school-wide default, see lesson 5, system prompts and school-based personas.