To effectively analyze the one way coupled thermoelastic problem for composite laminated shells, a simplified thermoelastic shell model based on the variational asymptotic method (VAM) was developed. The 3 D energy functional for composite laminated shell was established according to the Hamilton extended principle. Then the 3 D energy was asymptotic expanded into a series of 2 D approximation energies by taking advantage of the inherent small parameters. Finally, the approximate energy was converted to the form of Reissner Mindlin model, and the 3 D recovery relationships were deduced to accurately predict the 3 D field distribution along the thickness direction. The cylindrical bending example of a four layer composite laminated shells under the sinusoidal surface load and temperature field shows that the modeling speed is fast (equivalent single layer model, which can reduce two or three order calculations compared to the 3 D finite element method), and the nonlinear approximation ability is excellent (convergent to the exact solution).