AI prompts for differentiated instruction

Written for teachers. The same lesson scaffolded, leveled and stretched for the students at its edges — the task changes, the objective never does.

• 01 Ten sections that start from a lesson you already wrote — this kit never plans one
• 02 30 fill-in prompts — the three-level pass, the scaffolded lesson, the leveled passage, the stretch, the choice board, the two-adult plan
• 03 30 follow-up steps, including the one page you hold while teaching and the single answer key that covers all three practice sheets
• 04 30 failure modes, each with the prompt that repairs it
• 05 An 87-page manual, a one-page START HERE, a printable quick-reference page, and a plain-text file every prompt copies cleanly from

The first prompt does not ask for “a differentiated lesson.” It starts from the lesson you already wrote. You paste it, say your grade and subject, and ask for its main task three ways — one for the students who need a way in, one for the class as planned, one for the students who were done thinking about it before the bell. The objective and the exit ticket stay identical across all three. What changes is what the task demands, never how much of it there is. And all three have to run in one room, in one period, on the materials already there — say that up front or you get three lesson plans wearing one lesson’s name.

That first version is usually most of the way there. The follow-up chain is the rest. One step adds a teacher-only line to each version: what a student would already have to be able to do to start there, and what you would see in the first ten minutes that tells you that you aimed wrong. One writes the last five minutes, where the class comes back together on one question every version can answer out of its own work. One compresses all three onto a single page you can hold while teaching. In the practice section, the chain builds one answer key that covers all three sheets and marks the items that are identical so you check them once.

The ten sections are the three-level pass; the scaffolded lesson, rebuilt around chunked steps, a checkpoint after each chunk, sentence starters and one worked example; the leveled passage; readiness groups and station tasks; the stretch, which goes deeper instead of longer; choice boards where every route actually hits the target; assessment designed to be shown more than one way; the two-adult plan written in the second person so the other adult can pick it up cold in the hallway; homework and independent practice at three levels from one source; and the weekly routine — which prompts run weekly, which run per unit, and the scaffold bank that stops you rebuilding the same three moves every unit.

Differentiation has its own failure modes, and the dangerous ones look like success on the page. The kit names thirty of them before you meet them and gives you the wording that repairs each one.

Two matter more than the rest. The first is quantity wearing a level’s name: four items, eight items, twelve items, the same kind of thinking three times at three lengths. It reads as differentiation and it grades as endurance. The second is the lowered bar — the support version comes back shorter, the questions easier, the objective’s verb quietly sliding from “explain” to “identify.” That is a parallel track being laid one worksheet at a time, and it is the most damaging thing this kit exists to catch. Close behind is the level printed on the student’s copy: a heading that reads “Below Grade Level,” a tier number, a routing line at the top of the packet. Children decode that in about four seconds, and once it is on the paper you cannot take it back.

The rest are specific to their sections. A leveled passage that is really a summary, with the numbers and the reasons gone — hardest to catch, because you supply the missing half from memory and your student cannot. A rewrite that drops the reading age and the student’s age with it. Groups cut by rank instead of by need, with a paragraph of student description attached. Four stations, three of which need an adult, describing a room with three of you in it. A choice board with an easy corner where nobody has to think, taken reliably by the students it was built for. A stretch that becomes a poster and stops measuring anything. And an answer key that arrives formatted and certain and is wrong in exactly the place the practice was built to catch.

The free starter card carries the four rules and ten cross-cutting prompts at principle level — enough to get a usable first draft out of a model. It does not carry Kit 04’s follow-up chains, its thirty failure modes and their repairs, or the printable quick-reference page. That line is deliberate and it does not move.

You describe the support a task needs — reads below grade level, loses the thread in multi-step directions — never the student who needs it. Categories, not conditions. Nothing from an IEP or a 504 goes into a chat window, de-identified or not, and no prompt in the kit asks for one. The kit also refuses to draft plan content: no goals, no present levels, no service minutes, no accommodation determinations, nothing a team signs. That is written inside your school’s process, by the people in the room. The refusal is written in because a model that has not been told will volunteer all of it — that is documented in the kit’s own test transcripts. The assessment section designs formats and never scores them: no rubric levels, no points, no cut score. You judge every product.

The prompts are plain instructions with no tool-specific syntax. The runs behind this kit were against Claude, in the exact wording that ships. Nothing outside the Claude family has been tested, so the kit does not claim it works there — a dated model-notes page inside says exactly that.

Teacher Kit 04 · $7 · 87-page manual · on sale now