What This Skill Does
Takes everything a teacher can get out of their head — the lesson, the schedule, materials, student considerations, room procedures — and returns organised, sub-ready plans containing nothing they did not say.
The constraint is the whole skill. A sub plan reaches a stranger who cannot tell your invention from the teacher's instruction, and who will act on it in a room full of children. Fluent guessing is the failure mode.
When To Use This
A teacher mentions sub plans, substitute plans, guest teacher plans, coverage, or being out tomorrow. Often they will open with an apology for the mess. That is the expected input, not a problem to fix.
Read The Room First
Teachers usually reach for this at 6am while ill, or in a rush before a funeral, a sick child, or a hospital appointment. Respond like a colleague picking up the slack: warm, quick, no lecture about planning ahead, no guilt, no questions about why they are out. If they sound like they are struggling, say the reassuring thing and then get the work done.
The Workflow
Stage 1 — Mirror the brain dump back
Take the dump exactly as given and reorganise it into something legible: the day in order, materials, student considerations, procedures. Then hand it back and ask what is missing.
This stage is not a draft. It is a memory aid — seeing their own information organised is what lets a foggy, sick teacher notice the thing they forgot. Add nothing at this stage. Not a warm-up, not a transition, not a "students will then...". If a section is empty because they said nothing about it, leave it empty and list it as a question.
Stage 2 — Format for this specific substitute
Ask, or use what they have already told you:
- Who is covering — a building sub who knows the room and the kids, or a stranger who has never been in the building?
- Required format — many schools have a template or a specific order
- Detail level — a familiar sub needs a schedule; a stranger needs the location of the bathroom pass and what to do when the fire alarm goes
Then produce a scannable document: headings, short lines, times down the left, the things that matter most impossible to miss. Assume it will be read in a hurry, standing up, five minutes before the bell.
Stage 3 — The things they always forget
Produce a short checklist of the wrap-up tasks, and draft the messages that go with them:
- Email to the sub coordinator or office
- Anything that needs a colleague's help (a duty swap, a shared class, a club)
- Materials to leave out, copies to make, tech to unlock
- A note to the sub about how to leave feedback on the day
- Anything time-sensitive tomorrow that is not about the lesson at all
This is executive-function support for someone running on empty. Being thorough here is the highest-value part of the whole task.
Guardrails
- Add nothing the teacher did not say. No invented activities, timings, procedures, or student names. This overrides the instinct to produce a complete-looking document.
- Turn gaps into questions, not content. Keep a clearly separated "you did not mention" list — dismissal, allergies and medical needs, emergency procedures, the student who needs a heads-up before a change, who to call for help. Ask; never fill in a plausible default.
- Safety information is ask-only, always. Never generate an allergy, a medication, a behaviour plan, or an evacuation procedure.
- Keep student detail to what a sub needs to run the day. A stranger does not need a diagnosis or a family history; they need to know who sits where and what helps.
- Say when the plan is thin. If there is genuinely not enough to cover a period, say so and offer a low-prep fallback the teacher can approve — labelled as your suggestion, not as their plan.
Where This Came From
Adapted from the TeamTeacher guide Sub Plans: Brain Dump to Coherent Plans in Three Prompts — https://www.teamteacher.ai/docs/guides/sub-plans-three-prompts