Differentiation is universally acknowledged as good practice. It is also, in practice, one of the most time-consuming elements of lesson planning. Writing three versions of the same task — a supported version, a standard version, and an extension — takes roughly three times as long as writing one. Multiplied across a full week's lessons, the extra planning time is substantial.
AI changes this calculation significantly. With the right approach, a well-differentiated lesson takes only marginally longer to plan than an undifferentiated one.
What good differentiation actually involves
Before using AI for differentiation, it helps to be clear about what you're actually differentiating. The three main levers are:
- Content — what students are learning. Usually the same for all; sometimes scaffolded for students with significant prior knowledge gaps.
- Process — how students engage with the content. This is where most in-class differentiation happens: tiered tasks, different levels of scaffolding, varied grouping.
- Product — how students demonstrate understanding. Offering a verbal response option alongside a written one, or a structured frame alongside an open task.
Most classroom differentiation focuses on process. That's also where AI assistance is most effective.
Prompting AI for tiered activities
When generating a lesson in ScholaPlan, the class profile you've entered (ability range, behaviour notes, any SEND notes) shapes the AI's output toward more differentiated structures. For more specific differentiation, you can use the lesson editor to expand particular sections.
When working with any AI tool, specific prompts produce better results than vague ones. "Give me three versions of this task for different ability levels" is less effective than "Give me a supported version of this analysis task for students who struggle with abstract thinking, with a sentence stem and a worked example, and an extension version that asks students to compare two texts rather than one."
Generating scaffolded resources
The most time-consuming differentiation materials are often not the activities themselves but the scaffolds that support them: writing frames, word banks, worked examples, visual timelines, simplified versions of source texts. AI can generate these in seconds.
Practical examples:
- "Write a paragraph frame for an analytical essay on this topic, with sentence starters and gaps for students to complete"
- "Create a vocabulary list with definitions for the following technical terms, appropriate for a Year 9 student"
- "Simplify this source text to a reading age of approximately 11, keeping the key information"
- "Write a worked example of how to answer this question, using a different example to the one in the task"
Each of these would take 15–30 minutes to produce manually. AI produces them in seconds, leaving the teacher to review and adjust rather than create from scratch.
Differentiation for EAL students
Students learning English as an additional language need specific types of scaffold: pre-taught vocabulary, visual supports, sentence frames, and tasks that allow demonstration of understanding without requiring advanced language production. AI can generate these supports alongside the standard lesson materials.
A prompt like "Add an EAL support section to this lesson plan, including a pre-teaching vocabulary list and a simplified instruction card" produces something usable that a teacher can then adapt for specific students' language levels.
The limit of AI differentiation
AI can generate differentiated materials at the level of the class profile it's been given. It can't calibrate to a specific student's needs without you providing that information explicitly. The final step in differentiated lesson planning is always the teacher's knowledge of specific students: who needs the scaffold, who should have the extension, who needs an alternative mode of expression entirely.
AI handles the production. You provide the personalisation. Between the two, genuinely differentiated lessons become achievable within normal planning time.
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