Skip to content

Case study: Integrating Gemini into a lesson planning assessment in Music Education.

School of Arts and Creative Technology
Caroline Waddington-Jones

Caroline Waddington-Jones provides an overview a lesson planning assessment within a Music Education Masters programme. The submission includes three parts:

  1. A lesson plan created in collaboration with Gen AI (Gemini)
  2. A commentary reflecting on the process and making connections to theory
  3. A 'processfolio' of records of prompts and responses created in the process of developing the plan.

The assessment was introduced in the 2025-26 academic year in recognition of the growing uses of AI within professional practice in Music Education and in response to a perception that students were already using AI and needed structured engagement and support to develop critical AI literacy skills.

Caroline reports on positive outcomes for students. The activities provided beneficial support with planning, especially for those with relatively little experience, and they supported more critical and productive uses of Gen AI across the cohort. Challenges around lesson planning and reflection remain and Caroline intends to address this through more hands on lesson planning and commentary writing in future.

Watch their presentation:

Integrating Gemini into a lesson planning assessment in Music Education (Panopto viewer) (7 mins 00 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Right. So I'm here to give you an overview of an assessment from one of our music education MA programs. And this assessment is a lesson plan and commentary. So for the lesson plan, students have to respond to a scenario that we give them. They have a choice between special education and early years teaching basically. And they have to respond in collaboration with Gemini AI. So they have a choice of roles. And I can speak a bit more about that later perhaps, for Gemini, in order to collaborate.

And then they have to reflect on this via a 1500 word commentary where they think about their lesson plan, content and the planning process, and they have to touch on the AI collaboration, thinking about what Gemini brought or didn't bring and how helpful that was or was not. They also have to importantly think about their own experiences as a human, as a learner, as a teacher, what they brought to the table, and they have to make some connections to theory. There's quite a lot to do in a commentary, but they've been quite good at doing it so far.

The third thing they have to submit that's unmarked is a processfolio. And this is essentially a dumping ground of transcripts with the AI, just so that we can see conversations have taken place and what they might have looked like. Um, and we don't tend to scrutinise that too closely, except where we have concerns about the content of the lesson plan or the commentary, perhaps, where we might want some more context, and they might have some screenshots from those transcripts as part of the commentary to illustrate bits of their analysis of their AI collaboration.

So that's the sort of the broad shape of the assessment. The rationale for it is grounded in real world sort of teaching profession, basically because um, gen AI, for better or worse, is here and educators are using it and in some cases are expected to use it for planning for enhancing their teaching and learning practice. So I sort of, I feel like as, as university educators, then we need to be at least laying foundations for this, for professional practice so that that was the main driver behind this.

And then I think the other the other driver behind it was it felt like a natural point in the module to do that because, um, I marked the previous iteration of this assessment, which was basically the same, but without AI. And this was in January 25, and I realised that the students were using AI and using it quite badly. It became apparent that from some of the lesson plans, there were these really outlandish ideas where you thought, has this person never met humans before? Have they ever stood in front of the class before? Turns out possibly not, because possibly it's mostly AI content. And then there were the typical things that I'm sure all of us are seeing with hallucinations and fabricated references and so on.

So if students are using it anyway, we would much rather they were using it critically than trying to use it sneakily and uncritically by themselves. We made critical AI literacy a learning outcome so they have to really evaluate what Gemini is suggesting and think critically about the lesson plan, The final version of it and also analyse their interactions. The human contribution I mentioned earlier, making that really visible, thinking about what they bring and then evidencing their interactions as well, which I touched on.

In terms of how it's gone down with the students, they actually haven't really batted an eyelid about the fact that AI is incorporated, and I don't know, I realise there are many views on Gen AI among students and staff, quite rightly, and. But perhaps it's the characteristics of this particular cohort, I'm not sure, But both times we've introduced this assessment, no student has particularly questioned the presence of AI there. Perhaps this speaks to how they themselves are using it or expecting to use it professionally. So they appreciate it basically as the feedback that I have had. They appreciate that their being that it's being acknowledged as a tool that they can and should be using in some way. The other interesting thing is, before we had AI in the assessment, quite a few students struggled knowing where to start with planning a lesson, and I think particularly those who were less experienced as teachers or um, as yeah, particularly those who hadn't worked with the specific groups of learners for this module. So AI is a way in has been interesting to thinking about the lesson planning scenarios that we give them. And then over the course of the module, it's been interesting as well to see that students do develop a sense of how they can work critically and productively with gen AI.

So all in all, student responses have been positive to this assessment. Where it's been trickier, it's not really been about the AI. It's been things that they were struggling with previously, like actual lesson planning principles. There have been still some examples of students maybe leaning a bit too much on AI, doing a bit too much outsourcing, but it's less blatant than it was, I think this idea of making AI allowed and visible within the assessment has prevented some of the, um, some of the worst uses of it. And then just yeah, on top of that, sort of pedagogically, I think it is a lot of content for the reflective commentary, but also I think writing concisely and, um, with critical depth is a skill that our master's students need. So we're thinking about how we support that through the teaching of the module.

Where does this leave us? Well, it is running again this year. Things we've thought about changing are how we support it through the teaching. Last year we had two formative assessments, but they seemed to work, so we've kept those. I had considered a weekly reflective processfolio that sort of goes across the module instead, where they have maybe a reflective task after each taught session. Some of those might be sort of working with Gemini to sort of craft a response to something, and then writing a short reflection on what that felt like, or to sort of build skills across the module. But it hasn't really felt necessary is where I've landed on that. I ran a critical AI literary session with the full cohort in week two, and the students all stated that they were feeling very confident about AI, which is also a contrast to the previous two years, where they felt a little bit more shaky about AI, maybe the first year, and only some of them felt confident the second year. So that's maybe a sign of changing, changing cohort characteristics as well. So we've decided not to go with that this time. We'll see how that goes. Um, and then yeah, just subject specific stuff for us is more hands on lesson planning, thinking about what they are struggling with and more targeted guidance and practice at the actual commentary writing. So there you go.