I’ve been a little radio silent lately, because I’ve been working on something special.
Lest I be accused of not giving back to the community, here’s a lesson planning plugin for Claude you can use.
It started life based on my own lesson planning skill that I use weekly, but quickly expanded and got hot-rodded for teachers that… aren’t me. It’s highly customizable, from what standards you put in to what type of plans you get out. Take a minute, download, and give it a shot!
Here’s a rundown of what it actually does.
Setup happens once. You give it your state or district standards — paste them in or attach the documents — your district’s lesson plan template if you have one (it has a workable default if you don’t), your courses, and any recurring weekly routines. Warm-ups that happen every single day. A journalism deadline every Friday. Whatever instructional framework your admin is currently calling “the framework.” Enter it all once and the skill holds it. You’re not pasting your standards document into a chat box every Sunday night until the end of time.
After setup, the weekly workflow is four questions: what week is this, which subject, anything specific this week, and is there an end-of-week assessment? That’s it. Four questions, and it goes to work.
What comes back is a filled Word document, not a wall of chat text you have to reformat yourself. Each day gets a learning intention written in whatever “I am learning / I can” format your district requires, instructional components tagged with your framework, a materials list that skips the obvious items (if you need to be reminded to bring a projector, I can’t help you), and a differentiated instruction section. That last part actually matters: a lot of us run beginners and advanced students in the same room — Chorus, CTE, combined Journalism classes — and the differentiation is written for that reality instead of pretending everyone’s at the same point.
You’re not pasting your standards document into a chat box every Sunday night until the end of time.
One thing that caught me off guard: it just remembers your routines. My chorus class starts with vocal warm-ups and sirens every single day, no exceptions. I entered that during setup, and I haven’t typed it since. Every chorus plan it builds has warm-ups at the top. I noticed this partway through the first week and felt an amount of relief that was probably disproportionate to the situation. (Turns out there are at least a few things you do every week that you’ve completely stopped registering as tasks.)
I built it to be as efficient as possible with tokens and context, so hopefully the holes it blows in your budget aren’t painfully large. After the initial ingest and setup, it should be a lot more lean. That first run is a beast.
If you run into issues with it, showstopping bugs, or just have an idea to make it better, let me know on Github. If it saves you a little time on prep work, take a nap in my honor.
