COMA: A Collaborative Multi-Role Agent Framework for Automated Lesson Plan Generation

A lesson plan (LP) is a structured guide outlining instructional objectives, methods, and assessments to ensure organized learning. However, existing LP creations are often time-consuming, inconsistent in structure, and lack pedagogical mechanisms for real-time adaptation to diverse learner needs. To address these issues, we propose a co llaborative multi-role a gent framework called COMA for automatic LP generation. COMA formulates LP generation as a collaborative workflow among multiple LLM agents with distinct pedagogical expertise: (1) the novice agent that represents a novice teacher possesses an overarching understanding of the intended lesson flow but demonstrates limited precision in implementing the specific instructional actions; (2) the veteran agent that represents an experienced teacher demonstrates deep familiarity with the curriculum, textbooks, and the knowledge components embedded in each unit; and (3) the master agent that represents a pedagogical expert exhibits a well-developed and confident grasp of lesson progression, with the ability to design, adapt, and implement specific instructional actions effectively and responsively. Through an iterative workflow, these agents collaboratively refine LP quality. Comprehensive experiments across five subjects, using expert-designed metrics, demonstrate that COMA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, producing lesson plans with superior quality, coherence, and pedagogical alignment. Our framework offers a robust solution for generating deployable instructional content at scale. Data and code are available at https://github.com/ai4ed/COMA-LessonPlan.