Built for the teacherwho is still becoming one.

MyLessonStudio is an AI-enabled lesson planning tool built for pre-service and early-career teachers — designed to support their professional development, reduce the stress of planning, and build the judgment that sustains a teaching career. How AI belongs in teacher preparation is a question every faculty of education is working through right now. We've been working through it too.

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MyLessonStudio interface preview
Where preparation endsand classroom realities begin.

Research consistently shows that new teachers who feel prepared are more likely to stay in the profession — yet early-career teachers are among the least likely to report feeling ready for what the classroom actually demands (Groeneveld et al., 2023). A large-scale study of over 77,000 teachers across 24 countries found that early-career teachers experience disproportionately high levels of distress, identifying workload and feeling underprepared as the primary drivers (Groeneveld et al., 2023).

Canadian teachers report working an average of 12 hours per week on planning alone, with 77% reporting emotional exhaustion (TheFutureEconomy.ca, 2025), and attrition risk is highest in the first five years of practice (Center for American Progress, 2025).

That is the problem we set out to address.

Picture one of your graduates at 11pm. Their practicum is over. The faculty relationships, the supervision visits, the structured feedback — all of it ended in April. Now it's October and they're alone at a desk trying to build something coherent for tomorrow. They open an AI tool. They type a prompt. Something comes back. It looks like a lesson plan. Whether it builds the lesson planning schema they'll need for the next thirty years depends entirely on how that tool was designed.

The question isn't whether AI will be part of how your graduates plan. It already is. The question is whether they encounter it first in your program — with structure, with pedagogy, with supervision — or alone.

12
hours per week spent on planning
77%
of Canadian teachers report emotional exhaustion
5 yrs
the window when attrition risk is highest
The problem isn't AI.It's AI without structure.
As AI evolves, we remain committed to research-informed development that bridges the gap between what teachers learn and what they do in the classroom. MyLessonStudio supports the critical thinking and professional judgment at the heart of teaching, rather than replacing it.
Two bodies of research shape how we think about this. Together they point to the same concern: that without structure, AI removes the productive struggle that builds judgment and expands work rather than bounding it.

The Brookings Institution reviewed 400+ studies and found that frictionless AI creates cognitive debt — measurable decline in critical thinking through repeated offloading (Burns et al., 2026). When AI does the thinking for the learner, the learner stops developing the schema that professional practice requires. The framework they offer is useful: AI as co-pilot structures the learner's own inquiry, rather than doing the thinking for them (Burns et al., 2026). For pre-service teachers, that distinction matters more than almost anything else about how a tool is designed.

A separate Harvard Business Review study found that AI consistently intensified work rather than reducing it — through task expansion, blurred boundaries, and constant multitasking (Ranganathan & Ye, 2026). An unstructured AI tool handed to a student teacher doesn't reduce the demands on them. It expands those demands in ways they don't yet have the professional capacity to manage.

These two findings are what led us to build MyLessonStudio the way we did.

The teacher leads.The AI follows.
The problem with AI tools: they amplify whatever you give them whether it is good or not. We set out to build a platform that puts high-quality professional thinking in — so that what comes out is high-quality planning. The way AI is integrated means the teacher, not the AI, is the one designing the lesson.

Before MyLessonStudio generates a single word, the teacher has already created a profile where they have:

  • Articulated their teaching philosophy
  • Named their beliefs about student learning
  • Identified professional growth goals
  • Defined the culminating task that anchors the unit
  • Selected pedagogical lenses that shape how lessons are framed
  • Described their class context

That profile is injected directly into every step of the process. What comes back sounds like the teacher — because it was built from the teacher. The AI extends their thinking. It does not replace it.

MyLessonStudio Design Process
1
Create a Class
Subjects, grades, learning goals
2
Create a Culminating Assessment
Define the final task students will complete — the anchor that makes backward design possible and keeps planning purposeful from day one
3
Generate a Unit
Built using Understanding by Design
4
Generate Lessons
Personalize with CRAFT framework — a structured approach to lesson design that ensures each lesson is coherent, responsive, and connected to the unit
5
Extract Resources
Handouts, slides, worksheets, and more

The profile pre-service teachers build, and the planning framework they work within, can be configured to reflect the language and commitments of your program.

Understanding the structurebehind great lessons.
Each step in the design process reflects what experienced teachers know about planning — made visible for teachers who are still building that knowledge.

Expert teachers carry an internalized lesson planning schema built over years. They know automatically to think about engagement before content, to separate the goal from the activity, to keep the culminating task visible. They don't know they know this — it has become instinct.

We purposefully scaffolded this schema. Every field in the lesson planning template built into MyLessonStudio is a question an experienced teacher asks automatically — surfaced at the moment a pre-service teacher needs to encounter it.

Opening Provocation
Engagement before content. Teachers must consider how students will enter the learning before deciding what subject matter they'll cover.
Learning Focus
Separates the goal from the activity. Novice teachers consistently collapse these — treating an activity as the objective rather than the means to one.
Curriculum Connections and Culminating Assessment
Keeps backward design visible at the lesson level. Teachers can see how today's lesson connects to the broader unit and serves the culminating task.
Universal Design
Positions access and inclusion as planning decisions, not afterthoughts — built into the lesson structure from the start.
Formative Assessment
Embeds checking for understanding into the planning process itself, rather than leaving it to in-the-moment improvisation.
An Invitation
MyLessonStudio was built around a single purpose — to support pre-service teachers through one of the most demanding parts of their development — not by doing the work for them, but by ensuring the work builds something that lasts.

A teacher's own beliefs, goals, and context go in first. AI works from that foundation. Planning schema that expert teachers carry is made visible, scaffolded, and repeatable — so that by the time your graduate stands in front of a class alone, they've already rehearsed the thinking many times over.

If you're curious about what that looks like in practice, let's talk.

The question was neverwhether to use AI.It was whether AIwould be used well.That is a research-informed decision —and one we continue to explore.
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