Making AI More Accessible for Special Educators: Meet the AI Planning Companion
Generative AI is becoming an increasingly common part of educators’ toolkits, but knowing how to use it effectively can be challenging. For special educators in particular, instructional planning often requires careful consideration of individual student needs, accessibility, IEP goals, behavior, communication, and a wide range of other factors.
The AI Planning Companion is designed to help make that process a little easier.
Created by CEC member A.J. Naatz, the AI Planning Companion is a free tool that guides educators through using generative AI for everyday planning tasks. Rather than requiring educators to start with a blank chatbot and figure out what to ask, the tool provides guided workflows that help users identify the type of support they need and provide relevant information about their lessons, students, and instructional goals.
Designed With Special Education Planning in Mind
The AI Planning Companion can support a variety of planning needs, including adapting lessons and instructional materials, developing IEP-aligned supports, creating behavior and progress-monitoring resources, preparing guidance for paraprofessionals, and supporting family communication.
The tool is intended primarily for special and general educators working in inclusive settings, but it may also be useful for related service providers, instructional coaches, teacher educators, and other professionals involved in designing accessible instruction. It is designed to be approachable for educators who are interested in AI but may not have extensive experience writing prompts or evaluating AI-generated materials.
That focus on accessibility and ease of use grew out of Naatz’s own experiences as a special education teacher. “Teachers have been increasingly interested in AI, but general-purpose tools often require substantial prompting knowledge and do not necessarily account for the complexity of special education planning,” Naatz explains. “As a teacher who was constantly playing catch-up, I rarely felt like I had the time to learn an entirely new educational technology tool and the skills needed to implement it effectively.”
This tool was created to address that challenge by bringing the AI process into a more structured, guided experience.
A Planning Partner—not a Replacement
The tool was developed as part of Naatz’s design-based dissertation research examining how generative AI could strengthen instructional planning for students with extensive support needs in inclusive classrooms.
Importantly, the goal was not to replace teachers’ expertise or decision-making.
“The goal is not for AI to replace teacher decision-making and instructional planning,” Naatz says. “Instead, the AI Planning Companion is designed to help educators bring their knowledge of their students and classrooms into a guided process that allows them to use AI more intentionally, efficiently, and responsibly to support their students with disabilities.”
Teachers remain at the center of the process. They determine what information to provide, review and revise the resources generated by the tool, and ultimately decide whether and how those resources should be used with their students.
The tool was also developed iteratively with teachers across Wisconsin. Feedback from educators working in authentic school settings helped shape the planning tasks, guided questions, privacy processes, and overall user experience.
Keeping Student Privacy at the Center
For educators exploring AI, student privacy is an important consideration. The AI Planning Companion incorporates privacy and validation prompts into every task workflow.
Before generating a resource, users complete a checklist that asks them to confirm they have removed identifying information and consider the privacy, accuracy, potential bias, instructional alignment, and appropriateness of both the information they are submitting and the resulting resource.
Educators can also sign in using a Google account, including a school- or district-managed Google Workspace for Education account when permitted by their organization. This provides authenticated access to an educator’s account and saved work.
However, the tool does not replace educators’ responsibility to follow their school or district policies regarding third-party technology. Users are directed to avoid entering information they are prohibited from sharing.
A New Resource for Educators Exploring AI
The publicly available version of the AI Planning Companion launched near the end of the 2025–2026 school year, informed by extensive feedback from teachers who participated in earlier versions of the tool during Naatz’s dissertation research.
Those educators helped shape the tool and its approach to guided AI use, providing feedback that informed everything from the planning tasks available to users to the structure of the questions and privacy safeguards.
For educators who are interested in exploring generative AI but aren't sure where to start, the AI Planning Companion offers a different approach: instead of asking educators to become expert prompt engineers, it provides a guided process that starts with what educators already know—their students, their instructional goals, and their classroom contexts.
As AI continues to become part of the educational landscape, tools designed with educators—not around them—can help ensure that technology supports professional expertise rather than attempting to replace it.
Explore the AI Planning Companion