Preparing my naturopathy school courses with Claude: structure, examples, exercises
I teach as a guest faculty member in a naturopathy school. Preparing a three-hour class used to take a full day of work. Finding the angle, structuring the plan, gathering examples, building exercises that make students think. I finished exhausted before I had taught anything.
Today, Claude does the heavy structural work with me. It never gives the class. It sets the table. I save all my energy for live teaching, where a teacher truly earns their keep.
The problem
Teaching future naturopaths requires a rigor you do not improvise. Students come looking for clarity, experience, applicable protocols. They have also often read contradictory things that need to be reframed without shaming them.
Preparation time is the first tension. A three-hour class rests on two days of serious work. Over a semester with several classes, the equation breaks down if you add the practice, the brand, the conferences.
The second tension is coherence. Over a multi-week module, classes must chain. What you say in week three must build on week two. Examples should travel, answer each other, consolidate. Without an orchestration tool, you rebuild partly every time.
What I set up
A three-layer preparation pipeline.
The structured plan. I give Claude the topic, the audience, the duration, and the mandatory checkpoints defined by the school's curriculum. It proposes a plan in two or three variants. I pick, I edit, I validate. The plan is not frozen: it is a starting point. But starting from a clean plan saves me an hour per class.
Examples and cases. I then ask for examples that illustrate the plan's notions. Anonymized cases drawn from my previous courses, not fabricated. Parallels across body systems. Situations students can debate. The instruction is strict: it must never fabricate a study or a statistic. No source, no quote.
Exercises. Third pass, exercises. I ask for graded, realistic scenarios. A simple case to introduce, an intermediate one to consolidate, an open-ended one to spark discussion. Each exercise is designed to fit in ten to twenty minutes in a classroom.
A coherence filter across the series. At the end of the semester, I run a global pass. Claude rereads all the plans, flags redundancies, gaps, involuntary contradictions. I fix them. The series gains cleanliness.
The result
Preparation time per class dropped from about fourteen hours to about four. Across a full semester, that gives me weeks back. I put them into consultations, articles, rest.
Perceived quality went up, not down. Students tell me my classes are clearer and better paced than before. I believe that is because I arrive in the room more rested, more focused, more available to their questions. The class is not better because Claude prepared it. It is better because I am not depleted when I walk in.
And there is an effect on me. Because I no longer spend evenings structuring, I read more. The authors I wanted to revisit, recent scientific articles, notes from older classes. What I save on structure, I invest in depth. The material regenerates.
How you can replicate this
This applies to any trainer, teacher, regular guest lecturer. The time equation is universal: preparing takes more than teaching, and you end up cutting into what matters.
Start by defining what a good class is for you. Write it down on one page. Which qualities you aim for, which errors you refuse, which rhythm you enforce. Without that compass, the AI will give you a generic plan that does not look like you.
Work in layers. Plan, examples, exercises. If you ask for everything at once, you get a coherent but shallow document. If you chain through stages, each layer can be tuned independently and quality rises.
Enforce the sources rule. Your audience trusts you on your references. If Claude cites an author, verify the author actually said that. If you cannot find the source, replace the quote with your own phrasing. A fabricated quote in a class is a professional failure, full stop.
Keep time for the human side. A class prepares the encounter with students. AI never replaces it. It makes you available. Use that availability.
If you want us to build your own course-preparation pipeline together, I can help.
Read next
- Instagram carousels from my naturopathy courses to keep the course alive outside the classroom.
- Granola and Claude: my second brain to capture your own lessons live and reuse them clean.
- Pre-consultation questionnaires the same AI applied to the clinic.
— François