How to Set Up Claude for Teachers Before School Starts
Dr. Steve Troyer · August 3, 2026
School starts in about a week for a lot of you. Mine usually started the first week of August, which meant the stretch right now was the last one where I could think a whole thought.
Here is what I would spend it on, and it is not a lesson.
Most teachers who got verified this summer are using Claude like a search box. You open it, type the whole situation from scratch, get something generic back, and close it. Then tomorrow you type the whole situation again. That is not the tool failing. That is the tool having no idea who you are, every single morning.
What is an AI teaching system?
An AI teaching system is the class context, standards, formats, and review rules you load into Claude once, so that every request after that starts from your classroom instead of from nothing. It is a setup, not a subscription, and you build it yourself in an afternoon.
Four things go into it. None of them require knowing a single student, which is exactly why this is the week to do it. You have never had less student data and more uninterrupted time than you do right now.
| What goes in | Why it matters | Time |
|---|---|---|
| What you teach | Grade, subject, curriculum, and class length, so drafts stop arriving sized for somebody else's period. | 15 minutes |
| Your standards | The Learning Commons connector grounds drafts in your state's standards instead of the internet's average lesson. | 5 minutes |
| Your formats | Your rubric taught once as a Skill, so feedback comes back sounding like you rather than like a website. | 90 minutes |
| Your review rules | Standing instructions to flag assumptions, name what to verify, and never use student names. | 15 minutes |
1. What should Claude know about your classroom?
Grade, subject, curriculum, class length, and how your schedule actually runs. Not the schedule on paper, the one where third period is short because of announcements.
This is the part you retype into every prompt otherwise, and it is the reason so many first drafts come back looking like they were written for somebody else’s classroom. Fifteen minutes.
2. Which connector should you turn on first?
Turn on Learning Commons. Anthropic says it carries academic standards for all fifty states, the prerequisite skills underneath them, and curriculum context including Illustrative Mathematics and OpenSciEd.
Claude for Teachers ships with nine partner connectors alongside it. Add those one at a time once school is running. Learning Commons is the one everybody should have on from the start, because it changes what every other request is grounded in, and because a plan built without it will tell you so in its own footer. I walked through that exact gap in the standards alignment edition. Five minutes.
3. How do you teach Claude your rubric?
Your rubric, your lesson template, the way you write to families. Anthropic’s Skills let you teach Claude one of these once so it holds across sessions instead of you re-explaining it every time you sit down.
Start with the rubric. Give it your real rubric, your real grade-level language, and three comments you actually wrote to actual students last year. Three is enough. It is the difference between feedback that sounds like a website and feedback that sounds like you.
This is the ninety-minute part, and it is the one that pays.
4. What review rules should you set?
Write down what it must always do, and paste it into your system instructions. You are setting the terms now, while you have time to think about what they should be, rather than in October when you are tired and it hands you something confident and wrong.
Always tell me what you assumed when the information was missing, instead of filling the gap silently. Always end with what I need to verify before this reaches students. Never use student names, and tell me if I paste one by accident. If you are not confident about a standard, a fact, or a grade level, say so rather than guessing.
That is an afternoon. Maybe two if you are thorough about the rubric. You do it once, and it keeps working every time your class changes shape, every time you plan a new unit, and every time a colleague asks how you got a draft that already matched your rubric.
My one warning
Do not put students in it yet.
You do not have real data on this year’s students. What you would be loading is last year’s roster notes and your own predictions about names on a list, and I have watched good teachers decide who a kid is in August and then spend until Thanksgiving being right about it.
A system loaded with predictions will sound confident about children it has never met, and it will not tell you it is guessing. Set up the part that is about you. The part that is about students comes from records that already exist, and that is a separate job.
What do you still review yourself?
Three things, every time, no matter how good the setup gets. Whether the standard is represented accurately, whether the timing survives contact with your actual class, and whether the examples are correct. They are the same three checks I ran against the first lesson packet in July, and they have not changed since.
The setup makes the draft start closer to your classroom. It does not make the draft right. You still read it, and you still decide what reaches students.
Next edition: where to find real data on your students in the first two weeks, when you have names and nothing else.
One question before you go. What are you teaching first this year? Reply with your grade and your subject, and I will build the next example around it. I read every reply.
If you want the full setup written out, with the prompts and the review checklist, the Claude for Teachers Field Guide is free. It arrives immediately, and every new edition lands in your inbox as the series runs.
Get the Field Guide, freeCommon questions
- Do I need a paid Claude account to do this?
- No. Anthropic is offering verified U.S. K-12 educators a free year of Claude for Teachers, described as a free Claude for Teams plan, and educators who sign up by June 30, 2027 get the full year. Verification uses a school email.
- Does getting verified turn the connectors on automatically?
- No. Each connector is a connection you enable and sign into, and some partner services carry their own paid tiers and their own district approval questions.
- Can I put student names in it?
- Follow your district's guidance first. The practice recommended here is initials or ID numbers rather than names, and no pasted student work, which keeps the setup useful while minimizing what goes in.
- What if my district has not decided on AI yet?
- Everything in this setup is about your own planning inputs: what you teach, your standards, your formats, your rules. None of it requires student data, which is usually the part a district policy addresses.
- How is this different from writing a good prompt?
- A prompt is one request. A system is the context every request starts from, so you stop retyping your grade, subject, curriculum, and rubric every session.