AI prompts for report card comments
Written for teachers. A term of report card comments that sound like you and fit the box — personal, specific, and drafted before the deadline weekend.
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Report Card Comments for Teachers
For the weekend the comments are due, drafted before it.
Or the whole shelf: Every Teacher Kit — all six for $28.
01 — What is in Kit 06
- 01 Ten sections, from the fact sheet before the first comment to the bank you open next term
- 02 30 fill-in prompts — the comment that fits the box, the honest hard one, the specialist’s frames, the audit pass
- 03 30 follow-up steps, including the variation pass that stops comment twelve reading like comment eleven
- 04 30 failure modes, each with the prompt that repairs it
- 05 An 86-page manual, a printable quick-reference page, and a plain-text file every prompt copies cleanly from
02 — Facts in categories, name at the end
The kit does not start with a comment. It starts with a fact sheet: one student, three lines, no name. Doing well, working on, next step, in your own words, built from things you saw or graded. “Tries hard” does not go in it; a retake the student asked for in November does. A comment is only as specific as the sheet underneath it, which is why a term of vague sheets produces a term of comments that could have gone to anybody, written faster.
The comment prompt takes that sheet, your character limit and your pronoun choice, and returns a strength, a growth area and a next step in that order — the order that makes hard news hearable. Where the name goes it writes NAME, in capitals. You type the real name once, in your gradebook, when you paste the comment into the box. That is the whole privacy design: the draft is finished in the chat, the identity assembles at the destination. One student per run, always. No prompt in the kit accepts a roster or a gradebook export.
Ten sections cover the term. The fact sheet. The comment that fits the box. Your own past comments turned into voice rules you paste above every prompt for the rest of the year. Twenty-five in a sitting without the sludge. The honest hard one. Cutting a 500-character comment to 300, and reshaping a narrative comment for a standards-based card. The specialist’s problem — art, music, PE, four hundred students — handled with a small set of frames built from the patterns you see across a room rather than from students, each frame merged with the one specific thing that carries the child. The audit pass over the finished batch. The mid-term progress report, so the report card is never the first news. And the comment bank you open next term.
03 — When it comes back wrong
Report card comments fail in a small number of predictable ways. The kit names thirty of them and gives you the wording that repairs each one. Four are worth knowing before you decide whether to buy anything.
The first is diagnosis. You type “rushes written work” and the draft comes back “may struggle with attention” — one hedge away from a clinical claim you never made, in a document that follows the child. The second is sludge: somewhere around the twelfth comment every student is showing wonderful growth, and two comments that could swap students without anyone noticing tell both families the same thing. The third is the price of fixing the second. Pushed to be different, a draft reaches for a new detail before it reaches for a new sentence, and the new detail is invented — a hobby, a friendship, a moment at recess. It reads beautifully, and it is the one a parent repeats back to the child.
The fourth is quieter, and it showed up in our own testing. A 300-character box turned “12 of 40 on the timed multiplication check” into “still coming slowly” and dropped three unfinished writing pieces entirely. The comment fit perfectly and nothing in it could be acted on. The tighter the box, the harder you have to look at what got abstracted to fit it. Which is also why the kit never trusts a character count from an AI tool: in our runs a draft announced as sitting exactly on the cap measured twenty-nine characters over. The over-or-under verdict is useful as a pointer to which comments are worth checking. The number is not. The gradebook box rules.
04 — What is free, what is paid, and what never goes in the chat box
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 06’s follow-up chains, its thirty failure modes and repairs, or the quick-reference page. Everything on this page is the principle. The kit is the wording: the guard clauses that hold at hour three when a name slips into your facts, the repair you send in the same chat instead of starting over, and the audit that runs over the finished batch before anything enters a box. That line is deliberate and it does not move.
No student name goes into a chat window. Prompts take facts in categories and a pronoun, and the name is a placeholder by construction. The comment bank in section ten is the only place more than one student’s material arrives in a single paste, and there the stripping is a numbered step rather than a suggestion — what you save is your wording with the child taken out of it. Nothing in the kit writes IEP or 504 content, recommends testing, placement or repeating a year, or grades anything. A comment describes schoolwork. The rest belongs to a team and a process.
The prompts are plain instructions with no tool-specific syntax. The runs behind this kit were against Claude, in the exact wording that ships, and nothing outside the Claude family has been tested. The manual says that plainly rather than implying a check that has not happened.
How we handle this
Student privacy is absolute. Every prompt uses placeholders ([STUDENT], [GRADE], [SUBJECT]) — never instruct a reader to paste identifiable student information. No prompt may generate legally-binding IEP content or autonomous grading decisions; AI drafts, the teacher decides.
Teacher Kit 06 · $7 · 86-page manual · on sale now
05 — Questions
- Do I have to put student names or grades into it?
- No. Every prompt takes facts in categories — doing well, working on, next step — with no name, and writes NAME in capitals where the name goes. You type the real name once, in your gradebook, when you paste the comment into the box. No prompt in Kit 06 accepts a roster or a gradebook export, and nothing in it writes IEP or 504 content.
- Can it count characters so the comment fits my gradebook box?
- Not reliably, and the kit says so. In our runs a draft announced as sitting exactly on the cap measured twenty-nine characters over. The prompts use the model’s over-or-under verdict as a pointer to which comments are worth checking, then let the box that will do the truncating rule. Aiming a little under the cap is what absorbs the error.
- I teach art to four hundred students. Is this only for classroom teachers?
- No. One of the ten sections is written for specialists. It builds a small set of comment frames from the patterns you see across a room — never from students — and merges one specific thing into each. The frames carry the shared language; the one detail carries the child. If you have nothing specific on a student, the honest move is a shorter true comment, not a warmer invented one.
- Is this just a list of prompts?
- No. A prompt list gets you a first draft. Kit 06 ships 30 fill-in prompts, 30 follow-up steps that take that draft to a comment you would submit, and 30 documented failure modes each with the prompt that repairs it — 90 blocks across ten sections, plus an 86-page manual, a printable quick-reference page, and a plain-text companion file.
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Start with the free card
Ten prompts and the four rules behind them — the free starter card, plus one useful message now and then. Nothing else.