Every teacher knows the challenge of lesson planning: Creating one lesson that addresses the needs of students with many different reading levels, backgrounds and, sometimes, languages.
It’s nearly impossible.
Teachers understand their students learn differently, that their needs and attention spans vary. But customizing lessons to each student is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Teachers rarely have time to do this.
So often, the lesson is built for the average students, the ones in the middle. And the high achievers easily whip through it and the lower achievers struggle to grasp the concepts.
This is one of the oldest, most frustrating constraints in teaching. It's also one of the fastest problems to solve with AI, because differentiation is fundamentally a language problem: taking one document and re-expressing it at different levels of complexity. This is exactly what generative AI is good at doing.
So how can teachers apply it? Here are six simple steps to get started:
1. Begin with your existing lesson, as-is. Don't rewrite anything first. Paste your actual lesson plan, reading passage, or handout into your AI tool of choice (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude), exactly as you'd use it with your on-level students. (Note: We highly recommend a paid version of the tool, not the free version.)
2. Tell it what "levels" means for your classroom. Rather than asking for something vague like "make this easier," give the model concrete reference points: grade-equivalent reading levels, Lexile ranges, or simply "written for a student two grades below level" and "written for a student reading above grade level." The more specific your anchor, the more useful the output.
3. Protect what has to stay the same. Name the content or vocabulary that must be preserved across every version: key academic terms, the central historical event, the concept you're actually assessing. This keeps a 3rd-grade-level version and a 7th-grade-level version teaching the same idea, just at different depths. [*See sample prompt below.]
4. Add languages in the same pass. If you have multilingual learners, ask for the same leveled versions translated into the languages your students speak at home. You can request this alongside the reading-level variations rather than as a separate step.
5. Review before you distribute. AI-generated differentiation is a strong first draft, not a final one. Skim each version for accuracy, tone, and grade-appropriateness before it reaches a student. You know your students and your standards; the AI doesn't.
6. Build a library, not a one-off. Save your differentiated sets as you go. Over a semester, this becomes a reusable bank of leveled materials you can adapt again next year, rather than starting from zero every time.
This simple adjustment is a large, important shift that AI is ideal for supporting. For decades, differentiation was something only the most well-resourced classrooms could pull off consistently, because it required enormous amounts of a teacher's time. Now AI can do it in minutes.
AI isn’t meant to replace a teacher’s judgment about what their students need. That’s fully human. What AI can do is remove the time constraints that keep teachers from customizing the lessons for every student.
*Sample prompt
Role:You are an experienced 8th-grade social studies teacher who specializes in primary source instruction with heterogeneous classrooms.
Context: My class is a mix of 7th and 8th graders. About 30% are multilingual learners (Spanish, Arabic, Somali). About 15% have IEPs with reading-related accommodations. The rest are at or near grade level. I want every student to engage with the same historical voice — not three different substitutes.
- Preserve historical accuracy and key vocabulary at every level.
- At lower Lexile bands, gloss difficult vocabulary inline rather than removing it.
- Hold the author's narrative voice consistent across versions — students should recognize they're reading the same author.
- Do not soften or sanitize historical content. The passage is meant to be engaged with seriously.
Goal: I need three adapted versions of the primary source passage below — calibrated to roughly 1100L, 900L, and 700L — for use in a single lesson where students at different reading levels work with the same source.
Format: Create a markdown (.md) file. Output the three versions in order from highest to lowest Lexile band, each clearly labeled. After the three versions, include (1) a brief note on what changed at each level and why, and (2) a vocabulary support list for the lowest-band version with student-friendly definitions.