How your school's guidelines show up in every teacher's plans

Many schools and colleges have a written guideline on what a good course implementation plan looks like, how competence-based learning should show in tasks, or how AI is used in teaching. The guideline is often good. It just tends to stay on the intranet when a teacher sits down to plan Monday’s lesson.

Bruukki’s new Skills feature takes the guideline to where the planning happens. The workspace admin saves the school’s guideline as a skill. When a teacher asks Bruukki’s AI for a plan or a learning material, the AI picks up the skill and follows the guideline. The teacher can also ask the AI afterwards to check whether the guideline has been followed.

In this guide I walk through the whole chain with an example: how the admin saves a skill, how a teacher asks for a plan and how the AI uses the guideline. At the end you’ll find tips for writing a good skill and the limits worth knowing.

What a school gets from skills

The school writes a guideline once, and it’s part of every teacher’s planning. The guideline no longer waits for someone to open it. When a teacher works on a course implementation plan, the AI writes it the way the school’s guideline says.

This is how a skill works: when anyone in the workspace asks Bruukki to do something and the request matches the skill’s use case, Bruukki follows the skill’s instructions while it makes the material.

A skill is useful in situations like these:

• The school has decided on priorities that should show in teaching and learning materials.
• The school has a strategy and related guidelines that are followed in lesson planning, in teaching and in learning materials.
• The school has a guideline for a specific task, for example “How to write a good course implementation plan” or “How to write a good lesson plan”.
• The school has a guideline on assessment rubrics: how a rubric is built and what it must contain.
• The school wants teaching to be competence-based, and that should show in teaching, learning materials and students’ tasks. The school writes a guideline and saves it as a skill, and Bruukki follows it in different situations.
• The school has principles for using AI, for example when students may use AI, how they mark that use and which ethical questions a task should address.

When the school updates its guideline, the admin updates the skill. The change applies to every teacher from their very next request. Nobody has to download a new version or remember which guideline is current.

What a teacher gets from skills

Teachers don’t need to read through the school’s guidelines before every plan or wonder whether they remembered everything. The AI drafts a starting point with the school’s guideline already in it. The teacher reads the suggestion, edits it and decides what stays.

Teachers can also ask the AI afterwards: “Does this learning material follow the school’s guideline on competence-based learning?” The AI goes through the guideline point by point and says what is in place and what is missing. This also works for learning materials the teacher made before the guideline was saved in Bruukki.

Example: a course implementation plan that follows the school’s guideline

In this example, a Finnish college has a guideline for a good course implementation plan. An implementation plan is a description of a course written for the student, and the guideline has seven points: teaching methods, use of AI, time and place, optional ways of completing the course, student workload, progression of content, and assessment. The admin saves the guideline as a skill, a teacher asks for a plan, and finally the teacher checks an older learning material against the same guideline.

1. The admin saves the school’s guideline as a skill

The admin opens Settings, picks Skills from the workspace tabs and then New skill. The window has three fields, character counters and an In use switch. The Save button becomes active once every field has text in it.

The When should the AI use this? field is the most important line in a skill. The AI reads it to decide whether the skill fits the request. That’s why the line names the task, not the rule. Here it covers both writing the plan and checking it, so the same skill helps with both.

2. The teacher asks for a plan as usual

The teacher opens a new material and writes a request to the AI assistant. There’s no need to mention the skill or pick it from anywhere. The AI sees the workspace skills and picks the right one by itself.

The “point 1” labels and so on have been added to this example so you can see which point of the school’s guideline each part comes from. In Bruukki, the suggestion looks like an ordinary plan. The teacher accepts it into the learning material, edits it or asks for changes, as with any other suggestion.

3. The teacher checks an older course implementation plan

The teacher has an implementation plan for another course from last school year and has imported it into Bruukki. They open it and ask the AI whether it meets the school’s guideline.

The AI answers in the chat and doesn’t change the implementation plan, because the guideline says so. If the teacher replies “yes”, the AI makes the fixes as suggestions, and the teacher accepts them.

The views in this example are simplified and are not screenshots. The AI's answers vary with the request and the guideline.

How to write a good skill

One skill, one task. Make separate skills for the course implementation plan, the lesson plan and assessment tasks. The AI then picks the right guideline for each request, and one long guideline doesn’t mix up different tasks.

Name the task in the When line. “When a teacher writes or checks a lesson plan” works. “Competence-based learning matters” doesn’t, because the line states a rule but not which request the skill belongs to. Add checking to the line if you want teachers to be able to check learning materials against the same guideline.

Write the instructions for the AI as you would for a colleague. Short, concrete points work better than general values. “Say in every task whether AI may be used” is an instruction that can be followed, and you can check whether it was. The instructions hold 20,000 characters, so even a guideline several pages long fits in full. Markdown formatting works.

Put priorities where they are needed. If the school wants ethical use of AI to show in all planning, add a point on it to every planning skill, like point 2 in the example. A separate skill such as “Use of AI in tasks” suits the case where a teacher is planning a task in which the student uses AI.

Try the skill yourself. Save the skill, ask the AI for a plan and see whether the guideline shows in it. If it doesn’t, sharpen the When line first.

What skills don’t do

A skill is applied when a request matches its use case. It isn’t a rule that is always in force for everything the AI writes. If a guideline must cover everything, write it into every skill it applies to.

The AI is shown up to eight skills at a time. Workspace skills come first and teachers’ own skills after them. A workspace can save up to 50 skills.

A skill doesn’t override the safety, pedagogy and copyright rules of Bruukki’s AI. If a skill’s instructions ask the AI to ignore its own rules, Bruukki doesn’t save the skill.

The AI suggests, the teacher decides. A skill steers the AI’s suggestion towards the school’s way of doing things, but the teacher reads the suggestion and is responsible for what goes out to students. A check request helps with this, but it doesn’t replace the teacher’s own judgement.

Only the workspace admin can add and edit workspace skills. Teachers don’t see them in settings, so tell your teachers which guidelines you’ve saved. Then they know what they can ask the AI to check.

A teacher’s own skills

Teachers can also save skills for their own use. You’ll find them under Settings, in the account tabs under Skills, with the heading My skills. Your own skills are visible only to you and work only in your own chats. With your own skill you set out how teaching is organised in your lessons or what your learning materials should always include. For example:

• When you ask for a learning material, it always has certain parts, say objectives, vocabulary and a self-assessment.
• You describe which teaching methods you use and how students’ exercises are built, for example so that competence-based learning shows in them.
• A lesson plan is always built the same way.
• Certain exercises, such as reading comprehension tasks or calculation exercises, are built in a certain way.
• Bruukki always makes three differentiated levels at once, and the skill says how the levels are built.

If you want the skill used every time you ask for a learning material, write that in the When line: “When I ask for any learning material or exercises.”

Skills are different from the Custom Instructions field in the AI settings. Its text goes with every request, so it’s the place for general preferences such as “write in short sentences”. A skill is a guideline for one type of task, and the AI only uses it when a request matches.

Try it with your school

Skills are now available in Bruukki. If you’d like to go through your school’s guidelines with us and think about which of them to turn into skills, get in touch. If something doesn’t work, let us know.

Read also: What Finland’s national AI recommendations mean for schools and How to align your own teaching materials with the curriculum and local emphases.