DROPS

6 July 2026

FORMAT

Asynchronous

POSITION

03 / 05

SERIES

AI + Practice

01

THE CURRENT

What differentiation usually becomes by November.

The school year starts with the best intentions. You plan three versions of the reading task, one above level, one at level, one below. Monday's discussion goes well. By November, "differentiation" has quietly become a sorting structure: the same three kids always get the simplified version, the same three always get the extended challenge, and the labels nobody named out loud are doing real work in your classroom anyway.

The discomfort is that the framework you were given calls this "meeting students where they are." What it actually does is sort them by where they are not.

The work this workshop addresses is designing for who the student is as a reader, not where they fall on a scale.

02

THE REFRAME

Differentiation as identity work, with AI where it earns its place.

When differentiation works, it sees what kind of reader each student is. Reading level enters the conversation later, if at all. The deliverable is a class structure that lets a common text open up multiple ways: different entry questions, different lenses, different first moves, calibrated to who the readers actually are. The bulk of this is your work. Knowing your students, naming the variation that matters, designing the entry points: that is teacher work that does not need AI underneath it.

The AI parts are smaller and more specific. AI helps when you are holding the design in view across thirty students and trying to see who you are missing. AI helps when you are calibrating task design so a common task opens onto multiple legitimate paths. AI helps when you are sitting with a rubric and a struggling student and figuring out what kind of guided support actually fits. Those are real moves, and the workshop teaches them alongside the differentiation work that does not need AI at all.

AI's default failure on differentiation is generating leveled worksheets. Three versions of the same comprehension questions at decreasing reading levels. Fluent output, fast, plausible, and exactly the move that has been failing in your classroom anyway.

03

BY AUGUST

What you walk into the year with.

You have a differentiation design that works by identity, not by level. You know what kinds of readers you teach, what entry points each kind of reader needs into the texts you teach, and what kinds of task structures honor that variation without fragmenting the class into permanent tiers.

You also have an AI that knows your differentiation pedagogy. Not a generic worksheet generator. An assistant that knows what kinds of readers you teach, what your texts ask of those readers, and what kind of variation in task design serves the analytical work you do. The articulation work you did in the workshop becomes context the AI carries every time you sit down to plan a class.

04

INSIDE

The design work and what supports it.

You get audio that works through the pedagogy underneath differentiation, where most differentiation systems break down, and the reframe the rest of the workshop builds on. A structured prompt set walks you through the design work, with each prompt scaffolding a stage of the system you are building. Walkthroughs show how the pieces come together so you can see the design moves in action. You also build tools along the way that hold the architecture of your design and let you see whether the system is doing the teaching work you designed it to do.

The workshop does not stop at the drop. As you start implementing and questions come up, you send them my way, and I answer them in audio form on a private podcast feed that goes only to workshop buyers. The feed stays in your library alongside the rest of the kit.

Part of the workshop is teaching you to get AI output you actually want to use. That happens by helping your AI understand what you value about differentiation, including your pedagogy, your standards, and the way you think about this practice. The AI then functions as a specialized assistant for this work rather than a generic one. The same articulation work transfers to any other practice you want to train AI for after this workshop.

You will work across Gemini, NotebookLM, and Claude or ChatGPT, with a curated research base underneath the design work.

05

FOR MEMBERS

Take the differentiation work further into the year.

Inside Teaching for Today, the differentiation work extends past the workshop into your year-long workflow. Membership infrastructure tracks each student's reader-identity profile, what entry points have worked for them across texts, and where the design is missing a reader. The same infrastructure runs the student-facing communication that lets each student see what kind of reader they are becoming.

06

TAKE IT

Take this workshop, or take it inside a bundle.

This workshop runs $49 on its own. If you are thinking about more than one, the bundle options on the series page give a per-workshop discount that grows the further you go. The System Pair runs $89. The Responsive Trio runs $129. The full five-workshop series runs $199.

07

WHO IT IS FOR

This workshop was built for and by English teachers. The differentiation design assumes the work students do involves identity-shaped reading, that a student who reads for image and a student who reads for argument are doing real, distinct, English-teacher-recognizable things, and that the variation in your classroom is worth designing for.

A serious second-year English teacher belongs here. A veteran biology teacher does not.