Crafting Effective System Prompts: A Teacher's Guide
What Are System Prompts?
Like a director's notes hidden from the audience or a character sheet guiding a role-player, system prompts are secret instructions that shape an AI's behavior before any conversation begins. They define personality, rules, and context to ensure the AI responds exactly how you need—making them powerful tools for customizing AI assistants for your classroom.
A strong system prompt combines role identity, context, and action-oriented tasks to produce focused, high-quality outputs.
Basic Steps:
1. DEFINE THE ROLE
Who is your AI? Assign a specific identity.
This establishes:
- Tone and personality (e.g. friendly tutor, science mentor)
- Expertise focus (e.g. expert, highly trained)
- Output style (e.g. mentor, socratic)
2. SET THE CONTEXT
Who are you making this AI for? Identify the context and environment.
This establishes:
- Target audience (e.g. grade level, subject, specific needs)
- Topic scope and background (e.g. how experienced are students in this topic)
- Specific environment or situation (e.g. homework help, classroom discussion)
3. SET THE TASK UP AS A SEQUENCE OF ACTIONS
What tasks do you want your AI to do? State the tasks explicitly.
This establishes:
- Guidelines with clear action (e.g. explain, create, generate, simplify)
- Output deliverables (e.g. bullet points, markdown)
More Detailed Tips:
- Use Natural Language: Write your prompts in a way that mimics everyday speech, making it easier for the AI to understand your intent.
- Be Specific and Detailed: Provide as much context and information as possible to guide the AI towards the desired output.
- Specify an Audience: Tailoring prompts to your target audience can ensure more relevant outputs. For example, if you're writing a children's story, specify the age range and reading level of the intended audience.
- Provide Background Context: Adding context to your prompts can lead to more relevant results. Explain the scenario or narrative that drives your prompt to help the AI understand the purpose and desired outcome.
- Show and Tell: AI models often respond better when shown specific format requirements.
- Use Separators to Separate Instructions: Using backticks
``` [example text here] ``` as separators can improve the clarity of prompts for AI models, making it easier for them to distinguish between instructions and the data they should process. - Provide Examples: If you have a specific format or style in mind, provide examples to illustrate your expectations. Providing examples of the desired output format can significantly improve the AI's performance.
- Say Exactly What You Want and Don't Want: Don't leave your prompts open to interpretation. Be really clear and tell the AI tool exactly what to deliver and what to avoid.
Learning to use Markdown (a lightweight markup language used to add formatting elements to plain text documents) also improves output when using large language models. The following websites are useful for learning Markdown:
- https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/
- https://blog.webdevsimplified.com/2023-06/markdown-crash-course/#interactive-markdown-editor
- https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/