Redwood City, CA — Learning Commons collaborated with Anthropic to support the launch of Claude for Teachers, which provides Claude Pro capabilities for free to U.S. K-12 teachers. Powered by the Learning Commons connector and co-developed Agent Skills for teaching, Claude for Teachers allows educators to easily create and differentiate classroom-ready lessons aligned to high-quality instructional materials, learning science research, and state academic standards. Learning Commons and Anthropic are also making the infrastructure that guides LLMs to produce high-quality teaching materials available to the broader education field as public goods.
“To truly support educators, AI tools have to be rooted in what students need to learn and what the research says about how they learn best,” said Sandra Liu Huang, president of Learning Commons. “Our collaboration with Anthropic brings essential educational context to Claude and continues our investments in open infrastructure to improve the quality of AI-powered edtech across the board.”
According to Gallup, teachers most often use AI for preparing to teach, making student materials or activities, or modifying materials to meet student needs. Research also shows that educators frequently use general-purpose AI tools that have been trained on a broad range of online content, rather than research and data specific to education. As a result, recommendations are often generic and may not be aligned with state standards or learning science.
“We built Claude for Teachers by listening to teachers and asking them what they really needed. They told us that the AI tools they had were helpful but needed to be more relevant to what they were actually teaching and help them uncover where kids got stuck,” said Elizabeth Kelly, head of beneficial deployments at Anthropic. “The work we’ve done with Learning Commons has been vital — it is the reason we’re now able to offer teachers an AI option that is relevant to the curricula and mapped to state standards. We’re really proud of what Claude for Teachers offers, but this might be the aspect that makes the most difference.”
Claude for Teachers
Educators can use Claude for Teachers to create standards-aligned lesson plans and instructional materials in math, English language arts, science, and social studies. Claude for Teachers delivers printer-ready lesson plans, student resources and activities, and an observation template to help teachers track learning. Each lesson plan follows a consistent structure with phase blocks, timed allocations, and clear labels for teacher actions.
Teachers can also use Claude for Teachers to differentiate existing lessons by proficiency level, generating adapted versions for students who need additional support or greater challenge — all aligned to the same academic standards and learning goals. The differentiation package includes a teacher plan covering the three proficiency levels and three separate student worksheets designed to ensure all students access grade-level materials with the right supports.
How it works
Claude for Teachers connects to Learning Commons’ Knowledge Graph, a growing set of machine-readable datasets that cover high-quality instructional materials, learning science research, learning misconceptions, and state academic standards, as well as the fine-grained skills and concepts that comprise those standards.
Developed in collaboration with researchers, curriculum developers, and education experts, Knowledge Graph is an open resource available to all AI-powered edtech and LLMs, providing them with access to trusted instructional content and research-validated frameworks — improving precision, relevance, and instructional alignment.
When teachers submit a request, Claude draws on the Learning Commons resources to deliver materials that adhere to the full scope of academic standards, promote academic rigor, and are formatted for teachers to use in their classrooms.
Learning Commons also co-developed two Agent Skills with Anthropic — lesson planning and lesson differentiation — to help Claude for Teachers produce these materials. These initial Agent Skills are now openly available through the Learning Commons GitHub. Each skill packages the instructions, references, and guardrails an agent needs to generate consistent, high-quality materials. These resources can be referenced and used by developers to build AI-powered edtech using any LLM.
What’s next
Verified K-12 educators in the United States can access Claude for Teachers for free. Claude for Teachers is for educators only, consistent with Claude’s 18-and-over policy, and teacher conversations are never used for training.
Learning Commons will continue to collaborate with Anthropic to evolve and advance Claude for Teachers based on feedback from educators and the field, as well as develop additional Agent Skills and bring more educational datasets and resources to Knowledge Graph and Evaluators. These Learning Commons resources will be openly available, reflecting a commitment to building AI infrastructure to elevate educational excellence and serve the public good.
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Launched in 2025, Learning Commons builds on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s decade of work advancing learning science and translating research into classroom practice. Through shared, open technological infrastructure built for the public good, Learning Commons aims to better connect the way students learn with the tools they use.