Webinar: Differentiate Reading with AI

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TL;DR: Differentiating Reading with AI to Support All Learners

Teacher Take-aways
- Instructional Differentiation That Preserves Rigor and Expands Access
- Using AI to Implement Instructional Differentiation

Full Transcript and Prompts

TL;DR: Differentiating Reading with AI to Support All Learners

(Instructional Guidance, Transcript, and Prompts below)

Why Differentiation for Reading Matters

Many students struggle to access academic content because reading barriers prevent them from fully understanding grade-level texts. Differentiating reading materials is essential to ensure all students can participate meaningfully in learning while maintaining academic rigor and alignment to content standards.

Webinar Focus

This webinar explains how teachers can use AI as an instructional support tool to remove reading barriers without lowering expectations. The focus is on helping students access content while continuing to strengthen reading skills.

Two Student Groups

The session addresses two ends of the learning spectrum: students who struggle with reading and need scaffolds to access content, and students with strong reading skills who need enrichment and deeper learning opportunities.

Using AI Effectively for Differentiation

AI is positioned as a teacher-directed tool that supports instructional decision-making. It is not a replacement for curriculum, instruction, or professional judgment.

A Framework for Effective AI Use

Effective AI use begins by identifying the specific learning barrier, determining the instructional support needed, and then directing AI to produce targeted instructional materials that align with classroom goals.

Supporting Students with Reading Difficulties

Common Reading Barriers

Students may struggle due to low reading level, decoding difficulties, complex sentence structure, limited vocabulary, weak mental organization of information, or gaps in background knowledge.

AI-Supported Instructional Strategies

AI can be used to rewrite grade-level texts at accessible reading levels, generate decodable content aligned to phonics instruction, simplify sentence syntax while preserving academic vocabulary, embed just-in-time vocabulary supports, chunk long texts with summaries and guiding questions, and create background knowledge primers.

These strategies allow students to engage with the same academic content as their peers while receiving the supports they need to succeed.

Supporting Advanced Readers

Extension Without Extra Work

Students who already understand the content should not be given more work, but more meaningful work. AI can support this by generating companion texts, alternate perspectives, synthesis tasks, and advanced discussion questions.

Deepening Analysis and Critical Thinking

AI-supported extensions promote deeper comprehension, critical analysis, historical perspective, and application of knowledge across contexts.

Key Takeaways

Differentiation ensures every student can participate fully in content learning. Instruction begins by diagnosing the barrier, selecting the right strategy, and using AI to design targeted supports. AI functions as an instructional design tool, not a reading program.

Three Considerations for Teachers

Teacher Leadership

Teachers remain responsible for instructional decisions and the quality of learning materials. AI serves as a scaffold, not a substitute for professional expertise.

Copyright and Fair Use

AI-generated adaptations should follow district policies and fair use guidelines. Materials should be used for instructional purposes only.

Curriculum and Data Alignment

All instructional supports must align with curriculum standards and be driven by student data, whether from formal assessments or classroom observations.

Conclusion

Differentiating reading with AI allows teachers to preserve rigor, remove access barriers, and ensure all students can engage in meaningful learning. When used responsibly, AI strengthens instructional design and supports student success across the learning spectrum.

Teacher Take-aways

Instructional Differentiation That Preserves Rigor and Expands Access

Differentiation is most effective when it is anchored to a clear instructional goal: ensuring that all students can participate meaningfully in grade-level learning. This requires holding the learning target and cognitive demand steady while reducing barriers that are not essential to the target. In practice, teachers preserve rigor by keeping core concepts, disciplinary thinking, and evidence-based responses intact, while adjusting the pathway students use to access and process the content.

Start With Diagnosis, Not Materials

A high-leverage approach is diagnostic before it is tactical. Teachers first identify the primary barrier that is limiting comprehension or participation, then select an instructional response aligned to that barrier. When the barrier is vague, supports can become unfocused and add complexity without improving learning. A diagnostic stance clarifies whether the need is primarily related to decoding and word recognition, text complexity and syntax, academic vocabulary, background knowledge, or the student’s ability to organize ideas and monitor understanding. Once the barrier is named, teachers can match it to an efficient support that directly addresses the cause of breakdown.

Reduce Irrelevant Difficulty While Teaching Transferable Skills

Many supports can both improve immediate access and strengthen literacy over time when they are implemented deliberately.

Text accessibility and language supports help students engage with the same content as peers by lowering linguistic load (for example, simplifying syntax while preserving key academic terms, or providing brief, just-in-time explanations of critical vocabulary). These moves work best when they are selective and purposeful: they remove friction that blocks comprehension, but they do not remove the thinking work students are expected to do.

Structure-based comprehension supports help students build “how to read this” routines that strong readers use automatically. Instruction that chunks complex text into coherent parts, provides concise summaries, and prompts students to self-monitor can improve comprehension because it makes the mental organization of ideas visible and repeatable. Over time, students can internalize these routines and apply them more independently.

Background knowledge and vocabulary are core components of comprehension, not add-ons. Instruction that anticipates likely knowledge gaps and frontloads essential concepts can prevent miscomprehension and disengagement. This is often most effective as a universal support: all students receive access to brief primers, key terms, visuals, and orienting explanations, and students who do not need them can move on quickly.

Extend Learning for Advanced Students Without Increasing Workload

Differentiation also includes planned extension for students who already understand the baseline content. The aim is not “more” work, but richer work. Effective extensions increase depth and transfer through perspective-taking, synthesis across sources, and discussion that requires attention to author purpose, bias, and context. These tasks maintain equitable workload while raising the level of reasoning expected from students who are ready for more complexity.

Keep Instruction Coherent and Evidence-Guided

Teachers remain responsible for instructional decisions, material quality, and alignment to standards and curriculum. The data that guide differentiation should include more than formal assessment scores. Student work products, classroom observations, conference notes, and discussion evidence are actionable data because they reveal the specific point at which comprehension breaks down and whether a chosen support is improving learning. The data show whether a support is merely changing the task or actually increasing access to the intended learning.

Using AI to Implement Instructional Differentiation

Teachers can use AI as an instructional design tool to reduce access barriers, maintain cognitive demand, and extend learning for advanced students. The practices below operationalize evidence-aligned pedagogy through efficient, teacher-directed workflows.

1) Diagnose the Barrier First, Then Select the Strategy

Use AI to analyze student work, exit tickets, and formative checks to identify the primary barrier to comprehension or participation.

Determine whether the barrier is decoding, text complexity and syntax, academic vocabulary, background knowledge, or conceptual organization.
Select one targeted support aligned to the diagnosed barrier rather than layering multiple, unfocused accommodations.

2) Preserve Rigor While Reducing Irrelevant Difficulty

Use AI to adjust the pathway to learning while keeping the learning target and evidence of understanding constant.

Generate alternate text versions at accessible readability levels that preserve concepts, claims, and disciplinary vocabulary.
Simplify sentence structure and cohesion while retaining technical terms and key ideas.
Add just-in-time explanations for essential terms at the point of use.

3) Teach Transferable Comprehension Routines Through Structure

Use AI to externalize strong-reader routines so students can practice and internalize them.

Chunk long texts into coherent segments with brief summaries that reinforce gist.
Insert headings and margin notes that model how to organize ideas.
Add guiding questions that prompt self-monitoring, inference, and application.

4) Build Background Knowledge and Vocabulary as Lesson Readiness

Use AI to anticipate and preempt schema gaps that impede comprehension.

Create short, universal primers that introduce must-know concepts, timelines, visuals, and terms.
Curate concise concept maps and glossaries tied directly to the lesson’s central ideas.
Integrate vocabulary in context so students see how terms function within disciplinary explanations.

5) Provide Dual-Purpose Supports for Access and Skill Growth

Design AI outputs to support immediate participation and longer-term literacy development.

Produce decodable or pattern-aligned texts on the same topic to reinforce word recognition while learning content.
Reframe complex passages with clear cohesion so students practice processing academic language.

6) Extend Learning for Advanced Students Without Increasing Workload

Use AI to deepen analysis, synthesis, and transfer rather than assigning more of the same.

Generate paired or contrasting texts that broaden perspective.
Develop discussion sets that require author analysis, bias detection, thematic synthesis, and modern parallels.
Create application tasks that move ideas across contexts.

7) Keep Instruction Coherent and Evidence-Guided

Maintain teacher leadership over goals, materials, and alignment.

Align AI-designed supports to standards, curriculum scope, and unit assessments.
Use classroom evidence to verify that a support improves access and understanding.
Iterate based on student responses and performance.

Full Transcript and Prompts

Why Differentiation for Reading Is Critical

Guaranteed. You’ve got some students in your classroom that are having a hard time grasping the academic content because they are struggling to read. Welcome to Differentiating Reading with AI.

What we’re going to take on here are the supports and the assistance that students need with the reading materials, and differentiating the reading materials, so they can understand the academic content.

We already know how to teach reading. We know what skills students need. We know what an effective approach looks like. We know what effective strategies are for teaching those skills, but where it becomes a challenge is in differentiating the reading materials to meet students’ needs and to address the barriers, the reading barriers they have that prevent them from accessing the academic content.

We’re going to look at two groups of students in this webinar recording here.

We’re going to look at students at one end of the bell curve who have those reading challenges. And we’re going to use AI to provide some supports to help them access grade level content.
On the other end, we’re going to look at students with strong reading skills who have already grasped the content, and what can we do with AI to help support their needs as well.

Because the fact of the matter is, the job of a teacher is to provide effective instruction for all students. Some need some extra support; some need some extension. And we’re going to look at both of those in this time that we have together.

The first question is: Why do we even bother? Why do we differentiate?

Well, if we have students that are struggling understanding the concepts and the content because of their reading skills, then they are not going to be able to meaningfully participate in the classroom activities relative to that content.

So we need to make sure that we support them and preserve their ability to access grade-level concepts and content, doing two things at the same time.

First, we need to maintain the academic rigor. We’re not just going to simplify things for them. We want them to advance towards meeting the content standards.
And the second, more fundamentally, is we need to make sure every student has the chance to learn.

Webinar Overview

So in this webinar, in this recording of the webinar, we’re going to really look at two things deeply.

We’re going to look at, first, how do we get the AI to help us? How do we get it to do what we need it to do so that we can help the kids?
And the second, where we want to spend most of our time, looking at the specific techniques and strategies for using AI to help mitigate reading barriers between the student and what it is that we’re trying to teach them in our classrooms.

Now, you will see that all of this is going to be framed around effective curriculum and effective instructional delivery. That is the key thing. But if we’ve got kids that are struggling to read, then all of our best-laid plans for effective instruction kind of fall apart, and they’re not having an appropriate opportunity to learn the content. So instead of cutting them out of the process, let’s help them.

And we’re going to use AI to do that.

Section 1: AI Prompt Template for Differentiation

So first let’s jump into the prompting piece. How do we actually get the AI to give us what we need to help the kids? How do we get what we need from AI?

Well, really, the instructions that we’re going to provide to the AI fall under three groups, or there are three major components.

First, you have to know what the challenge is. What is the specific barrier that’s preventing kids from learning? See, if we can’t first identify the nature of the problem, then we can never design an effective solution. So, the first is understand the challenge.
And the second is, then, on the basis of that, determining what it is that you need to support the students.
And then we turn over to AI and we say, “Okay, with this challenge and this need, here’s what I want you to do.”

And, very specifically now, more formally fleshed out, it looks like this.

There are going to be seven components to every effective prompt for differentiating for different student needs, and really for most instructional purposes. All together they are the seven that you see there.

AI’s Role
Instructional Context
Learning Purpose
Student Considerations
Task Clarity
Constraints and Boundaries
Output and Format

But let’s let me flesh them out a bit for you so you can actually see what we put for each of those components.

Component 1: Role

First we have the role, which is what do you want the AI to be? Who is the AI that’s going to help you? Literacy coach, instructional coach, curriculum designer. Who do you need help from?

Component 2: Context

And then you can describe the classroom situation. You are a teacher. You will say, “I am teaching this grade, this content area, this subject, this particular topic.”

Component 3: Purpose

Then the purpose is what are the students supposed to be learning? What’s the new knowledge? What are the new skills? What are the new concepts that they’re supposed to get out of the instruction? That’s purpose.

Component 4: Student Considerations

The fourth piece is considerations, and this is where we’re defining the differentiation needs. “My students have the following needs.” And you’re define clearly, specify what it is that you’re trying to overcome. What is the barrier, or what is the unique need for the students for which you need any help?

Component 5: Task

Then, of course, we have to define the task. What do you want the AI to do for you?

Component 6: Constraints

And the constraints around that task? Do it in this way. Don’t do it in that way. For example, preserve the content. Don’t add any new information beyond what I’ve already given you. Keep the academic vocabulary is very likely something you’re going to use. Use student-friendly language. So, what are the parameters around the task that the AI should pay attention to? What can it do, and what should it not do?

Component 7: Output and Format

And then, of course, the outputs. What should it look like when the AI does something for you? It’s done. What do you have in your hands? What does it actually look like that you’re going to use with the students?

So those are the seven pieces. Now, as I show you examples and lots of strategies, you’re going to see all of those elements in the various prompts that I demonstrate. They’re going to be in more natural language, but they’re all there because these are the keys to an effective prompt that gives us the support we need.

(Pretty good so far, right?)

Section 2: Supporting Students with Reading Difficulties

Let’s start by looking at the kids on the lower end of the bell curve that needs some extra support, those students, specifically, whose reading challenges are preventing them from accessing grade level content.

And you will notice as we go through these that we are really focusing on the academic content and the reading barriers to it. We’re not so much talking about how do you teach reading here and how do you differentiate reading instruction. We already do that. We use zones of proximal development and the effective strategies and approaches and all of that.

However, having said that, you will note that most of the strategies that we use to help kids access the academic content will also be usable for helping them to improve their reading skills. So, although we’re focusing on the core subject content, the same strategies are going to also help to teach and improve students reading skills.

A Decision Tree for Identifying Solutions

So we start with the decision tree.

If this challenge:	Then this AI support:
Overall reading difficulty	Revise reading level, preserve ideas and content
Decoding barrier	Create decodable text, following phonic patterns
Syntax barrier	Lower complexity, preserve conceptual load
Vocabulary barrier	Reduce register, build academic vocabulary
Mental modeling barrier	Improve organization, support self monitoring
Background knowledge barrier	Build schema, activate prior knowledge

As I mentioned, first you have to know what the problem is, and then we can have AI help us with designing the supports.

So if it’s overall difficulty, it’s not any specific thing, just in general the reading level is low, the AI is going to revise the reading level for us.
If the problem is decoding, [students] look at the letters, but they can’t turn them into meaningful words that they know, then decodable text.

(I’m going to show you examples of all of these, so I’ll go through them pretty quickly here.)

If the problem is syntax, the language is just too dense and too many commas and too complicated, we can use the AI to lower that complexity.
If the problem is they [students] can read the words but they don’t know what they mean, well, then we can use the AI to not only provide as-needed, on-time support, but also to help them to build their academic vocabulary.
If the problem is modeling, which is the mental framework, the mental organizations that that the students need in order to understand, recall, and synthesize information, well, then the AI can help us to build those mental organizational tools.
And if the problem is they just don’t have the background knowledge, AI can also help with that.

So let’s go through some examples about how we can get AI to support us with each of these reading barriers.

Differentiation Strategy 1: AI Support for Overall Reading Difficulty

Starting with just general overall reading difficulties.

Now what we want to do here, instead of giving kids different texts and on different topics, we want to take the core academic text, and we want to bring it to their level.

Of course, we want all kids to improve in their reading abilities, right? But we’re teaching content here, and if they can’t read what we give them, then what we need to do is change the level of the written text so they can still access the content knowledge and participate fully in classroom activities.

So what we’re going to have the AI do is take the text that’s been provided to all the kids, and we’re going to rewrite it at multiple levels. For example, let’s just jump to our first prompt.

Prompt

You are an instructional reading specialist. Rewrite the uploaded chapter from Hatchet at Lexile level 750. Keep all facts accurate. Use short sentences and simplified vocabulary. Include a 2-sentence summary at the end.

Here you are an instructional reading specialist. Rewrite the uploaded chapter from Hatchet at level 750, Lexile level 750.

Hatchet is written at about 1050, so if we don’t have kids that are able to read and understand the content at that level, well, let’s modify it to where they can read it. In this case, for the example, Lexile level 750. Or we can say grade level, for grade level two, or whatever we need, so that the students can understand what they’re reading.

Keep all the facts accurate. Use short sentences, simplified vocabulary. And give me a little summary that wraps it up that the students can reflect upon.

(I’m not going to run all of these, but let me go ahead and show you what this one looks like.)

So I’ve got the chapter uploaded into my AI. I have my prompt there, and what the AI did is simply rewrite it by those parameters and the constraints that I gave it. And now we have the same text and the same content of the same information. But we’ve written it at a more simple level so the students can read it, they can understand it with their reading, and then they can participate fully in class.

So that is really great stuff.

Differentiation Strategy 2: Overcoming Decoding Barriers

Now let’s take a look at the next example.

Maybe the problem is decoding. This is a very specific and very common issue. They [the students] can see the letters, but they can’t turn them into spoken words that match what they have in their oral vocabulary, which is their working vocabulary.

So, we need to do something with the actual words, but at the same time, we also want to help them to build their decoding abilities.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to have the AI create brand new content on the same topic with the same information that we’re studying in class. But give me a whole new text and focus it on those reading patterns that we are implementing and working with students on in our reading program, so it’s going to correspond to the reading instruction that we’re already providing. It’s going to give them reinforcement and practice with those target patterns.

Prompt

You are a literacy intervention specialist. Generate a decodable passage aligned to CCSS RF.2.3. Target pattern: Long vowel teams (ai, oa, ee). Length: 150 words. The topic of the passage should align to NGSS 2-ESS2-3. Include 5 comprehension questions at the end of the passage.

So here you are literacy intervention specialist, a decodable passage aligned to that standard, the target pattern. We have the target patterns that we’re working on in our reading program. We have a length. And we have, very importantly, the nature of the content because this is the content that we’re trying to teach in class.

So we want to create something that they can read and that’s going to reinforce and strengthen their decoding abilities, but at the same time continue to deliver content so the students can fully participate in class and learn the academic content while they’re building up their reading skills.

Now, after that, include five comprehension questions at the end of the passage.

This is a very strong kind of two-for: build reading and build content, so students have the opportunity to learn both.

Differentiation Strategy 3: Overcoming Syntax Barriers

Now third type: sentence syntax barriers. Sometimes the writing is just too complex.

(For example, my writing tends to be at the higher ed / professional level. I don’t write to elementary school kids, or not very often, I’ll tell you that.)

But if what we’re giving them is just too dense, too many commas, too many clauses, too many interjections and parenthetical expressions, and all those things, and if that’s a barrier to understanding the content, well, let’s use the AI to deconstruct and simplify the sentences so that the students still get the concepts, the concepts we’re teaching, and we still maintain the rigor around the content standards.

It’s going to look like this.

Prompt

You are a middle school reading coach. Rewrite the uploaded passage for Grade 6 science. Break all complex sentences into short, clear sentences, following the subject-verb-object sentence structure. Do not remove any information. Preserve all academic vocabulary.

You are a middle school reading coach. Rewrite the uploaded passage for grade six science. Break the complex sentences and the clear sentences, and importantly, follow the subject-verb-object sentence structure because that’s the way brains expect information on are best able to organize and use the information. Who did what to whom? Subject-verb-object. So, we want to implement that in the simplified text.

Do not remove any information. And since the issue isn’t vocabulary but sentence complexity, preserve all the academic vocabulary.

Now we can produce something that students are able to read, grasp, and they’re not just going to get all tangled up in the commas, and at the end of an essay say, “I read all the words, but I got no idea what I’m supposed to learn from this.” Right?

So we’re going to give them that support.

Differentiation Strategy 4: Overcoming Vocabulary Barriers

Now, if the problem is vocabulary, if the primary barrier is vocabulary, we need to do two things here. Obviously, we want to reduce the vocabulary barriers, but at the same time help them to learn the academic vocabulary and the disciplinary language that’s embedded within the text.

So what we’re going to have the AI do is provide some equivalencies, some just-in-time support as needed. When [students] hit the word, support for understanding what it means, it’s no good to say, “You read all this stuff. Now let me test you on the vocabulary” or “After you try to weed your way through this, now let’s work on the words.”

We need that support to happen at the point of need, which is to say, the the kid gets to a word he doesn’t understand, and at that exact point, we need to provide the support

But at the same time, we want to build up the vocabulary, so we need some support for that as well. It looks like this.

Prompt

You are a Grade 5 literacy specialist. Rewrite the passage. Add student friendly definitions in parentheses for all Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary words. Then create a 4-column table: vocabulary term, student-friendly definition, original sentence, revised sentence to incorporate the definition rather than the term.

You are a Grade Five literacy specialist. Rewrite the passage. Okay, and here’s what we’re going to ask the AI to do: student-friendly definitions in parentheses for all tier two and tier three vocabulary terms. So that’s the just-in-time support now. Does every student need it for every word they encounter? No. But if they do, it’s there right when they need it.

Then create a four-column table, with the vocabulary term, a student-friendly definition, where that term occurs in the text, and a revised version of the sentence that incorporates the definitions so the students can experience and see how the words are actually used. And this is the part more about helping to build up their academic vocabulary.

Let me let me show you what this one looks like. So popping back to here, let’s take a look and rewrite with definition incorporated. All right, so there’s my text, and there’s my prompt right there. Then what we’ll see is that for all of those potentially challenging words, there is right away a definition.

So if you don’t know what “copilot seat” means, well, here it is in parentheses: “the seat next to the pilot”. Don’t know what we mean by “a steady drone”? Here it is: “a constant low sound.”

If a student doesn’t need the definition, the student can skip it. But if the student does need it, then we have to provide it when they need it. And that’s what this does here.

Then at the end of this, when it goes through a whole piece, now we’ve got our table. We’ve got the vocabulary term, the definition, the original sentence. and how the sentence can be re-framed to incorporate that definition to demonstrate “Here’s how you use the word.”

So very, very nice. And I will tell you this: Having run reading programs for more than 20,000 students, this is a really strong strategy for building up not just the understanding of the text and the content, but also the working vocabulary of the student.

So good stuff there.

Differentiation Strategy 5: Overcoming Mental Modeling Barriers

Now the next example is what I call “mental modeling.” There’s probably fancier term for it than that, but basically it’s helping students to create an internal organizational structure, a mental framework into which they can put the information, to make it easy to understand, easy to access and recall, and certainly easier to use. We have to help them build that.

What we often see is kids will read a long passage, and at the end of it, they just get this blank look on their faces like, “I have no idea what I just read. I got to the end of it, but I got no idea what it’s about.”

All right, well, we can help build that mental structure with AI by taking those complex, longer text and chunking them into small, manageable pieces, providing the headings and the subheadings to help them categorize and organize the information, and providing some guiding questions to help them reflect on it.

Because one thing that strong readers do, unquestionably, is they’re always asking themselves, “Do I understand?” And we’re helping to build that habit in students as well.

Prompt

You are an instructional reading specialist. Transform the document into a Grade 8 reading lesson aligned to NGSS MS-ESS2-1. Break into short chunks. Add headings, summaries, and margin notes. Add three guiding questions per chunk: literal, inference, application.

So, you are an instructional reading specialist. Transform the document into a Grade Eight reading lesson aligned to that standard from the Next Generation Science Standards. Break it into short chunks. Add headings. Add summaries. Add margin notes. All the things that help students to organize and make sense of the text.

Then give me three guiding questions per chunk.

I will show this one. This is a very strong strategy for helping students make sense of longer, complex texts.

All right, so there’s all of that. And then standards, etc. Here’s our first chunk from the text. Here’s a summary of what we just read about. Here are some margin notes and some guiding questions to reflect on so they can begin to ask themselves, “Do I know what I’m reading about?”

Very good support for those kids that just get lost in longer texts.

Differentiation Strategy 6: Overcoming Background Knowledge Barriers

Now the last one is knowledge barriers.

The fact is we don’t know what kids are bringing to the table when we give them a new text. And yet one thing that’s for sure is that all new information, all new text, gets filtered through and made sense of based on what students have already experienced and what they already know.

What if there are gaps in that knowledge? Then it makes it very difficult to read and comprehend new information.

(And just as a very quick example, when I was a high school English teacher, we were studying the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I mean, you know, it’s kind of an exciting story. You’ve got this ghost ship, and you’ve got skeletons running up and down the mast of the boat. I had one student with just this blank look on his face, looking kind of checked out. I asked him, like, “What’s going on? Do you understand what we’re reading about?” He said “No.” I said, “Well, what do you need?” Basically, what are you not getting here?

I was kind of young and inexperienced, so I probably could have asked that better. But what he said was really kind of transformative for me. He said, “What’s a mast?”

So here we are talking about skeletons running up and down the mast of the ship. He didn’t know what a mast was, which means he could not comprehend the overall passage because he was missing some background knowledge.)

We just don’t know what kids know when they come to us, so we need to make sure there aren’t any gaps in the knowledge they need before they encounter the text. We need to build up their schema, build up that background knowledge, and we can use AI to help provide that.

Now here’s the prompt.

Prompt

You are a Grade 9 social studies literacy coach. Create a 1-page student primer for the unit “The Industrial Revolution” aligned to CCSS RH.9-10.2. Include what students need to know first, key events in simple language, timeline of major events, visual description teachers can sketch on the board. Use student-friendly language.

Let me mention one thing. This is not something that I would give to just selected students. We’re going to get this support here from AI, and I’m going to give it to all the students because we just don’t know what they need to know. If they don’t need some of it, they can skip it. If they do need it, they’ve got it available to them.

Here’s the prompt. You are a ninth-grade social studies literacy coach. Give me, create a one-page student primer on that topic. Align to that standard. Include what students need to know first, what background knowledge they need in order to understand the new text that I give them. Include what they need to know: key events, timelines, visual descriptions, and of course, use student friendly language.

We give this to all the students, and those who are most in need of this kind of support will have it available to them.

Section 3: Supporting Advanced Students

So that is six examples, six strategies for helping kids whose reading difficulties are preventing them from accessing grade level content and academic content. But as I mentioned, we’ve got some kids on the other end, kids who already have strong reading skills and who grasp the academic content easily. What are we going to do for them?

If this ability:	Then this AI support:
Mastered content	Expand on text content, explore ideas
Strong reading ability	Provide deeper analysis and application

Well, I’ve got two strategies for you.

One thing we don’t want to do is we don’t want to give them more work. You know, “Hey, you were able to do the first ten questions really easily. Here’s ten more.”

Well, that’s not fair, right? And they would very rightly think, “Why do I have to do more work than all the other kids?” That’s not any good, so we want to maintain the similar workload, but at the same time we want them to explore the topics more broadly, and we want them to analyze and dig into the text more deeply.

And that’s what these prompts are going to do.

Differentiation Strategy 7: Supporting Students Who Already Understand the Content

So if they’ve mastered the content, we use the AI to help expand upon it. If they have strong reading skills already, then we want the AI to help us to extend and deepen the analysis and synthesis and application of the content. Looks like this.

For those students that need knowledge extensions, expand on the content and provide paired text with alternate perspectives of information.

Prompt

You are a grade 7 science curriculum designer. Generate two companion texts aligned to NGSS MS-PS1-2: one primary source, one modern scientific summary. Topic: Atomic theory. Include companion questions and synthesis prompts. Provide a student-relevant analogy.

Now, in this particular prompt, we’re actually asking the AI to come up with two companion pieces, but we can just easily say: here is part one, here’s the first text, which is what we’re providing to the general students, whether it’s from the textbook or articles or original sources or wherever it’s from. That’s one.

And then come up with a different perspective, or additional information, or conflicting and contradictory information, and have them build their understanding of the topic by looking at it from multiple perspectives.

You are a Grade Seven science curriculum designer. Generate two companion texts around that standard. Give me a primary source (or whatever you’re going to use there) and one modern scientific summary. The topic is atomic theory and include some companion questions and synthesis prompts.

We’re going to take the core knowledge, and we’re going to embellish or contrast it with different perspectives and different knowledge for the students to begin to round out their understanding overall.

That’s one.

Differentiation Strategy 8: Supporting Students with Strong Reading Skills

But for those kids who just have strong reading skills already, well, let’s build on it. Let’s help those reading skills get even stronger, while at the same time having them dig more deeply into the content.

So what we want to do is have the AI help us with extending the depth and the complexity and the transfer of understanding within the current text.

Prompt

You are an AP instructional coach. Create advanced discussion questions aligned to CFCSS RL.11-12.6 for chapter one of The Great Gatsby. Include: perspective analysis, author bias, theme across historical contexts, modern parallels. Organize the questions by theme.

Now, one thing we know for sure is that the number one strategy, bar none, the primary strategy for analyzing text and comprehending text is discussion. There’s nothing any stronger than that. So what we need here are some advanced discussion questions.

You are an AP instructional coach. Create advanced discussion questions aligned to that standard for that text right there, include perspective analysis, bias, theme (I know it says “them”, but it’s “theme”) across historical context, modern parallels, and so on, and organize it by type.

What we want to do is give those students more challenging questions, not additional work, but more difficult questions for exploring the text.

And I’ll show you what this one looks like also. So let me pull up number eight here. Okay, so there’s my prompt up there: AP-level discussion questions. So we’ve got our topics, our themes, and we have questions around each of those themes for students to explore. Maybe we give them one per theme. Maybe we have them select a theme. Maybe we let them choose 1 or 2 of the questions.

But the point is, regardless of how we go about it, we’re giving students a chance to think more critically, analyze more deeply, the content area text that we give them because they need to learn also, right?

They’re sitting in class. We tend not to worry about them because they’re already bringing up our overall test scores, right? So they’re fine, but they need to learn also. And they need challenge, as well, not just more work.

Section 4: Key Take-aways

So with all that being said: three main takeaways.

The first is why we are differentiating. We’re differentiating to make sure that every student can fully participate in content area learning within our classrooms.
The second is we have to know what the problem is, what’s the challenge first. And then we can determine and apply the correct strategy.
And the third takeaway is, obviously, the AI is not a reading program. It’s the tool that we use to design and implement the solutions to students’ needs.

So those are our three big takeaways: students can fully participate, we start with diagnosing the challenge, and we use AI to help create the solution.

Section 5: 3 Considerations and Cautions

Now some just general guidelines and cautions for teachers in general if we’re going to do this. I’m going to do this with three things we need to think about.

First is: the teacher is still in charge. We’re not turning over the teacher’s responsibility to the AI. Teachers are still accountable for what’s being produced and ensuring that it is appropriate and usable for the students. AI is a scaffold. It’s a tool, not the decision maker. That’s the teacher’s job.
The second is: we have to think about “fair use” principles. We want to make sure we don’t run into copyright problems or IP, intellectual property, infringement. So if your district or school has a policy around using copyrighted text, make sure you follow the policy. In general, you’re going to want to use excerpts, not full text, just to make sure you don’t cross the line outside of fair use. And then, most definitely, if you are asking the AI to reproduce text or revise it in some way, don’t distribute it. Use it for the academic purpose and that’s it.
And finally is: whatever solution we implement, whatever we ask the AI to do to help support the instruction and the learning in the classroom, obviously it has to align with the district’s curriculum. It’s got to be relevant. It has to be targeted at helping kids achieve the content standards and demonstrate proficiency against the content standards. And when we are trying to determine challenges and solutions, we’ve got to base it on our data. Now, this says “assessment data”, but that’s not always a formal test. It’s not our three-times-a-year ongoing assessment. It could be something as simple as our observations of the kids and our discussions that we have with them. Those are also data that help us to understand the nature of the challenge, and a reasonable and appropriate solution.

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And this, I have to say it, you can probably see that I’m very passionate about teaching and about learning. These are the tools over here, but the point is good teaching, leading to student learning and growth.

If this is something that your teachers are wrestling with, or your administrators: “How do I use AI to do that?” Give us a call. Send us an email. I’d love to help out.

Conclusion: Thank You, Teachers

And that brings us to the end of this webinar. So just a very quick note.

I have to say, “Thank you.” If you sat all the way through this, and this is a topic you’re interested in, it means that you actually care about student learning, which means your students are probably going to be well served by you. Thank you very much for that.

I hope you found this useful. Take care.