Keep a prompt file

The result is not in the tool

A chat window feels like a place where things are kept. It is not. Conversations get deleted, products change their interface, accounts get locked, the school switches from one provider to another. Anything you want to use again lives in a file you control, or it does not live anywhere.

So: a plain text file, on your phone and backed up to whatever cloud you already use. Not a document with formatting: plain text, so it opens anywhere and pastes cleanly. Call it prompts.txt. Everything in this lesson goes in it.

What to keep for each prompt that worked

Four things, together. Teachers usually keep the first and lose the rest.

1. The prompt itself, word for word. Copy it from the chat, do not retype it.
2. The context you pasted: the syllabus extract, the example question, the class description. This is the part that is forgotten and the part that did most of the work.
3. The output, or the part of it you used. Because the previous lessons explained that the same prompt gives a different draw next time, and the output you liked is the only copy of that draw.
4. A line of notes. The date, the tool, what you had to fix afterwards. “March 2026, Gemini free, answer key had two arithmetic errors, otherwise used as-is.”

A block in the file looks like this:

### Misconception questions — Class 7 science — March 2026 — ChatGPT free
PROMPT:
[the exact prompt]
PASTED:
[syllabus lines, example question]
OUTPUT USED:
[the eight questions]
NOTES: Q5 needed rewording. Distractors for Q2 were good — reuse.

Fifteen blocks like that, built over a term, are worth more than any prompt guide on the internet, because they are calibrated to your classes and your board.

The things you paste every time

Some material goes into nearly every prompt: your standard class description, your constraints line, your syllabus extract for the term, your vocabulary rules. Keep those at the top of the file as reusable blocks, and consider putting them where the tool will apply them automatically.

Most tools now have a feature for this. ChatGPT calls it custom instructions and projects; Gemini has Gems; Claude has projects and a preferences setting; Copilot has a similar option. You write your standing context once: “I am a Class 7 science teacher in a government school in Uttar Pradesh. 55 students, Hindi-medium with English science terms, no lab, 40-minute periods. Always use British spelling and rupees. Never give me a full lesson plan unless I ask.”, and it is included with every prompt in that project without you pasting it.

Two cautions. The stored context uses part of the memory window every time, so keep it under about 200 words. And the feature is a convenience, not a record: keep the same text in your file, because the product may change and the file will not.

Sharing with a department

A prompt file is the easiest thing a department has ever shared. Put it in the shared drive. A colleague who copies your Class 9 examiner block gets your calibration for free, and adds hers. Within a term the department has a library that new staff can use on their first day.

Agree one rule: every block records what had to be fixed. A prompt file that only lists successes teaches nobody where the failures are, and the failures are the useful part.

When the model changes underneath you

It will. Providers update models every few months, and a prompt that produced excellent distractors in March may produce ordinary ones in September. Because you saved the output, you can tell the difference between “the model changed” and “I forgot what I typed”, which is the check question. Because you saved the notes, you know what you fixed last time and can see whether the new version needs the same fixes.

When a prompt stops working, do not rewrite it from scratch. Paste the March output as an example (“make eight more like these”) and the previous lesson’s mechanism gives you back most of what the model change took away.

The honest limit

A prompt file makes results repeatable. It does not make them portable across tools without adjustment: the same prompt lands differently on Gemini and on ChatGPT, and the notes line should say which tool it was written for. And a prompt is not a resource. The file is a means of producing worksheets faster; the worksheets themselves, checked and used, are the thing of value, and they belong in the department’s resource folder, with the prompt file beside them, not instead of them.