The K-12 Lesson Differentiation Agent Skill was co-developed with
Anthropic ↗.
Overview
The K-12 Lesson Differentiation skill adapts an existing K-12 lesson for students at different proficiency levels (below / at / above grade level). It produces one teacher-facing differentiation plan plus three student-ready tier documents in Turn 1, all rendered from one master JSON via bundled scripts. Shared content is written once so tiers cannot drift. The skill uses research-based differentiation principles (Tomlinson framework + subject-specific access design) and works with or without the Learning Commons Knowledge Graph. The skill considers:- Source lesson identification from conversation history, uploads, or URLs
- Subject-specific differentiation rules and document templates
- Curriculum detection (for example, Illustrative Mathematics or OpenSciEd)
- State-specific standards anchoring when jurisdiction signals are present
- Grade-level demand preserved across all tiers
At a glance
| Workflow | Differentiate an existing lesson into below / at / above proficiency tiers |
| Subjects | Math, ELA, science, social studies |
| Grades | K–12 |
| Knowledge Graph | Strongly recommended via Quickstart: Connect Knowledge Graph |
| Repository | skills/k12-lesson-differentiation/ ↗ |
Getting started
Follow the Quickstart to start using this skill:| Access method | |
|---|---|
| Knowledge Graph MCP | Quickstart: Connect Knowledge Graph |
| Example prompts | example-prompts.md ↗ |
| Skill instructions | SKILL.md ↗ |
Triggers
Your LLM will programmatically load this skill when explicitly or implicitly prompted to differentiate, tier, or scaffold an existing K-12 lesson:- Explicitly: “differentiate this lesson,” “tier for below/at/above,” “scaffold for struggling and advanced students”
- Implicitly: “my students are at different levels,” “I have struggling and advanced students”
Output
| Artifact | Description |
|---|---|
| Teacher-facing differentiation plan | Plan explaining tier design, preserved core content, and scaffolding choices |
| Below-level student materials | Tier with scaffolding that preserves grade-level standard demand |
| At-level student materials | On-grade tier aligned to the source lesson |
| Above-level student materials | Extension tier with increased depth or complexity |
| Rendered files | Editable .docx Word documents on confirmation |
Rubrics
The K-12 Lesson Differentiation skill’s outputs are scored by the folllowing rubrics ↗.| Subjects | Math, ELA, science, social studies |
| Repository | evals/k12-lesson-differentiation/rubrics/ ↗ |
| File | Description | GitHub |
|---|---|---|
| differentiation.csv | Tiered differentiation criteria — below / at / above proficiency design, preserved core content, and grade-level demand across tiers | View in GitHub ↗ |
| clarifying_question.csv | Scorer for model clarification behavior before generating tiered materials | View in GitHub ↗ |
How to score
- Generate differentiated materials using this skill.
- Apply
differentiation.csvto the tiered artifacts andclarifying_question.csvto evaluate the model’s pre-generation clarification behavior. - Run LLM-as-judge or human review against each criterion. See Evaluating outputs.
Skill release history
| Date | Changed |
|---|---|
| July 14, 2026 | First release, co-developed with Anthropic |