Use Claude Cowork to grade papers and plan lessons
A teacher used Claude Cowork to speed up lesson planning, marking, slide creation, and grade analysis across several classes.
- What they did
- They created separate Claude Projects for each course, such as GCSE and A-levels, and filled each one with exam-board files, past papers, examples, lesson plans, slides, and other class materials. For marking, they removed student names from scanned work, gave each paper a number, and asked Claude to compare it with the mark scheme and example responses before writing tailored feedback. They also uploaded best-practice documents so it could suggest teaching approaches.
- How it went
- They said the system saved them hours on curriculum design, grading, PowerPoints, grade review, and differentiation work. The main concern was privacy, so they hid student identities before uploading work. Setting up Cowork on a new Windows PC took about half a day because virtual machine and hypervisor settings were switched off.
- Tips
- Keep student work anonymous before upload, and organize each subject in its own project with the relevant course materials. If you are using a new Windows machine, expect setup to take time if virtualization settings need changing.
Try it yourself with Claude Cowork
I teach [grade/subject]. Using the files in [folder/path], help me: 1) review the curriculum materials, 2) mark the student work against [rubric/mark scheme], 3) write brief feedback for each paper, 4) summarize class-wide patterns from [grade spreadsheet or papers], and 5) draft a [number]-slide lesson deck on the most common issues. First, tell me what files you can use and ask for any missing materials. Before you do anything that would send, submit, delete, or overwrite files, pause and ask for my approval. Save all new output as separate files and leave the originals unchanged.
Fill in the [brackets]. Agents can make mistakes, so review anything before it is sent, paid or deleted.
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