emPOWER your New Year’s Planning with TMLC’s AI Planning Tool

If you haven’t explored the TMLC AI Planning Tool, it’s certainly never too late and it’s actually now better than ever. Supercharged with more speed and accuracy so that you get the best of evolving technology, our AI Planning Tool is ready to empower your planning standards and best practices aligned plans that incorporate Thinking Maps. 

It’s simple. We are your critical thinking partner. We work alongside you to generate ideas using our Maps, helping you design unit and lesson plans, interventions, writing prompts, and assessments that align to your goals and work best for your students.

Generate rich tasks and questions quickly

• Use the Planning Tool to turn a standard or topic into several task types, such as a discussion prompt, a written response, or a performance task. Each task maintains the same cognitive demand and makes thinking visible through Maps. Have the Planning Tool suggest higher-order prompts like argue, evaluate, propose, or prioritize, then pair each prompt with a Map that support the thinking, then add a requirement like “Use a Tree Map to plan your response” or “Show both sides in a Double Bubble Map.”
• Build banks of Map-based exit tickets that check for reasoning, not recall.

Strengthen writing through Maps

• Generate writing prompts that demand reasoning, such as argument, explanation, or problem-solution, and then pair each with Map(s) that help students process and organize their thinking before writing.
• Ask students to submit their Map alongside the final draft and assess a small portion based on the clarity and completeness of the thinking shown.
• After grading, project a student's Map with names removed and revise it together before revising the writing, so students see how stronger thinking leads to stronger writing.

Targeted support and differentiation

• Quickly generate leveled versions of the same task while keeping the cognitive demand consistent. Students engage in the same thinking process, represented by the same Map, while scaffolds vary to support access, such as simplifying texts, numbers, or prompts, not the Map or the thinking itself.
• Build short routines with daily defining or vocabulary work (Circle Map) and weekly problem-solving steps (Flow Map), and let the Planning Tool help you vary the topics while keeping the thinking structure consistent.

You can fuel your daily Maps inspiration even more by exploring the Community Gallery and see how teachers and students are using Thinking Maps to develop critical thinking in the classroom.