by Wenger Guest Author Desiree Overree
If it seems like every professional development lately is centered around AI and you’re constantly being asked how you are implementing AI in your teaching, it can seem overwhelming and a little annoying! But there are also many ways that AI can help you win back some instructional time and make mundane tasks easier and quicker. Wenger guest author Desiree Overree has shared some of her favorite AI tools in this article, and you’ll also find a downloadable AI at-a-glance cheat sheet for AI resources that you can use in your music classroom.
The Reality of Faculty Workload
It’s no secret that being a music educator comes with a never-ending list of responsibilities. As educators, we often find ourselves navigating a maze of deadlines, paperwork, and logistical challenges. Administrative work—while essential—can be a time sink. Tasks like scheduling, email correspondence, student assessments, and “administrivia” pile up, leaving less time for the work that truly inspires us.
But what if you could regain some of your time and focus? Enter artificial intelligence (AI)—a powerful tool that can help lighten the load of administrative tasks, allowing you to reclaim your energy for teaching, impactful music-making and yes, even your personal life.
How AI Can Help
This is where AI comes in. By automating repetitive tasks and streamlining processes, AI can help you focus on what matters most: your students and your music-making. Here are several ways you can use AI tools to ease your workload and achieve better work-life harmony:
1. Automating Routine Communication
Responding to emails can consume hours of your week. AI-powered tools like ChatGPT can help you draft professional responses, create templates for common inquiries and information sheets, or even summarize lengthy email threads. Instead of crafting every response from scratch, you can edit and personalize AI-generated drafts in minutes.
I use ChatGPT weekly to draft sensitive emails, write news blurbs for our weekly newsletters, and pen publicity notices. My bilingual parents were flabbergasted when I used DeepL to translate as I typed in real-time. I’ve not been brave enough to use it to write college recommendations for my students yet, but I’m aware that some of my colleagues rely on it.
2. Simplifying Scheduling and Organization
AI scheduling tools like Calendly or Microsoft Bookings can take the back-and-forth out of arranging office hours, meetings, or advising sessions. AI-powered calendar assistants can also help you plan your day more effectively, ensuring you allocate time for deep work and personal breaks.
Need to organize your sectional schedule or accompanist rehearsal dates and time slots? AI can do it for you! We plug in our parameters including student versus accompanist availability, and voila, a mistake-free schedule is born!
3. Lesson Planning and Goal Setting
AI-driven platforms such as Brisk Teaching, MagicSchool, or ChatGPT can create dynamic lesson plans and assist in creating and implementing professional development goals, saving hours of tedious review. For subjective assessments, AI can suggest feedback language or provide initial drafts for rubrics, which you can then refine for individual student needs.
For the past three years, my T-TESS goals and SLO have been neatly packaged by ChatGPT. I came up with the goals, but ChatGPT wordsmithed, added citations of the TEKS standards, and generated measurable goals, thoughtful differentiation strategies, engaging activities, planned assessments, and even suggested technology integrations. I’ve also used ChatGPT to create my weekly lesson plans.
4. Enhancing Course Design and Creating Documents and Media
AI can support curriculum development by generating outlines, creating presentations, analyzing data, and even designing interactive content for your learning management system. With tools like Microsoft CoPilot or Canvas AI, you can spend less time on course logistics and more time refining the quality of your instruction.
From presentations to the concert, our program relies heavily on media. We’ve used Canvas AI to create royalty-free stock images in our concert programs, used LumaLabs AI to create short video clips, and ChatGPT has written our concert scripts and program notes for the past 3 years.
5. Data Analysis
Of course you can spend hours sifting through spreadsheets to compile data, but Numerous AI will be much faster.
Our EOY audition process can be quite daunting and cumbersome because of our 250+ musicians. One of the coolest things we used ChatGPT for was to extrapolate technical deficiencies in our students. Since we take our audition notes using a spreadsheet, it was easy for ChatGPT to examine the data and extrapolate these weaknesses. Not only did it summarize all three directors’ findings, it also created technical goals for mastery for the following school year.
Finding Balance with AI
While AI can save you significant time, the key to achieving work-life balance is setting boundaries and being intentional with your newfound time. Here’s how to get started:
- Define your priorities: Decide what you’ll do with the time you save. Will you invest it in mentoring students? Leveling up your already-incredible course content? Spending quality time with loved ones?
- Set work hours: Use scheduling tools to clearly mark your availability. Respect those boundaries—don’t let work bleed into personal time.
- Delegate to AI wisely: Not every task should be handed over to AI. Focus on repetitive or administrative work, while retaining control over tasks that require your personal touch.
The Future Is Here—and It's Supportive
Simply put, AI offers a lifeline. It’s not about replacing your role as an educator but enhancing it—empowering you to focus on the parts of your job that bring the most fulfillment while still having time for yourself.
By leveraging the right tools, you can reduce the administrative noise and reclaim your time, one task at a time.So, why not give it a try? The classroom of tomorrow is waiting—and so is your well-deserved rest.
*This blogpost was mostly written by ChatGPT in about 2 minutes.
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Desiree Overree
Desiree Overree is the Director of Orchestras at Seven Lakes High School in Katy, Texas. She has been recognized in “Who’s Who Among American High School Teachers,” awarded Katy ISD’s Excellence in Teaching Award multiple times, and has been recognized as an Educator of Distinction by the National Society of High School Scholars. In 2011, she was awarded the Yale Distinguished Music Educator Award: only 50 educators are awarded this honor in the United States every two years. In 2015, she was selected as a University of Chicago Outstanding Educator Award winner. In 2023, she was selected by the American Prize in Music as an Honored Artist. Honored Artists are individuals (or ensembles) who have proven themselves to be of "sustained excellence" over several seasons as laureates of The American Prize competitions. She is frequently invited as an adjudicator, presenter, clinician, and conductor, and is an active freelancer.
