Always delegate: email drafting, quiz/test creation, discussion starters, course outlines, announcement copy, and summary writing. Never delegate: one-on-one feedback, live teaching, or personalized student guidance.
The Delegation Principle for Teaching
Here’s a teaching analogy: a coach doesn’t personally run every drill the team does. She designs the drills, watches the team run them, and gives personal feedback to each player. Similarly, you shouldn’t personally draft every email, create every quiz, or write every discussion starter. Those are designed-once, used-many-times pieces. Email drafts, quiz questions, and course outlines are your “drills”—design them with AI once, then refine them for your students.
The things you can never delegate are the things only you can do: watching your students learn in real-time, giving them personalized feedback, and coaching them through their specific challenges. Those need your human attention.
The Delegate-and-Adapt Method
Email responses: draft with Claude or ChatGPT, then personalize with student names and specific details. Quiz creation: AI generates the base questions, you review for accuracy and add context from your teaching. Course outlines: AI creates a structure, you fill in your examples and stories. Discussion starters: AI suggests prompts, you pick which ones match your teaching style and values. Nothing goes to students untouched, but you’re not creating from scratch. You’re designing and refining, not writing from a blank page.
One consultant I know uses this: Monday morning, she asks Claude to draft her entire week’s email responses to typical student questions. She spends 30 minutes reading through, personalizing five of them with specific student names and contexts, then sends those as templates her assistant can reference. That saves her three hours. Her one-on-one coaching is still personal and real.
What This Means for Educators
You have limited hours. The question isn’t “should I use AI?” It’s “where should I spend my limited hours?” Spend them on what only you can do: coaching, presence, and personalized guidance. Let AI handle the designing-once-using-many-times work. This is how solo teachers and coaches scale without sacrificing quality.
Delegate by Category
Delegate administrative content creation (emails, quizzes, outlines, announcements). Always keep: one-on-one feedback, live teaching, and personalized coaching. This isn’t about doing less—it’s about doing what only you can do.