Simplifying Small Group Differentiation with AI

Welcome to Teacher’s AIed: the newsletter about AI in the K12 Classroom.

How AI will affect K12 Classrooms is complex. Each week, we curate knowledge for educators about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of AI and K12 education.

This week’s edition is a second installment on leveraging the opportunities of AI to support lesson planning.

When I taught elementary school, we had a unique learning block called “Power Hour.” During this hour-long block, all the students in a given grade would switch classes to learn literacy skills alongside their peers with a similar literacy level. Within each differentiated class, we broke students into smaller groups so that they were learning discrete skills alongside their peers.

Each quarter, we would re-assess students and re-create groups. We took an entire teacher workday to group students by classroom and then by discrete skills within the classroom. I spent hours creating bespoke lesson plans for my small groups and analyzing their data each week.

With the affordances of AI, the hundreds of hours we spent each year to differentiate and plan lessons for our small groups would be cut to a few hours each quarter.

Today, we will focus on strategies for Tier 2 teachers, namely those who are AI-competent and want to leverage AI tools to take their differentiation to the next level.

Too Long Didn’t Read; TLDR

For those of you who are AI-proficient, we will walk through the data security steps you should take to protect your student's personally identifiable information, then explore a surprisingly simple process to create small groups from assessment data, understand the unique needs of each small group, and finally create a week’s worth of differentiated literacy lessons for one small group in a fifth-grade classroom.