On this page you'll find prompts and AI skills I use in my teaching and design work. They allow me to use AI with reliably high quality results for day to day tasks like lesson planning, lesson observations and larger projects like curriculum design. Many of these are inspired by AI techniques used by programmers, adapted for my own use cases. Feel free to try them out, and make them your own. I currently mostly use these in VS code (A programming tool: https://code.visualstudio.com/) using Claude Code and Codex but most of these you can just use in the app versions of Claude or ChatGPT or any other app that supports custom repeatable prompts.
A prompt is just instructions you paste as plain text into any chat assistant (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude). A skill is a prompt your AI agent can run again and again on demand. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a saved prompt; sometimes it bundles a few extra files, so the assistant can do a more involved job the same way every time. Some skills work inside a file system: they read and write to a folder you point them at, usually in a tool like Claude Code, Cowork, or Codex. If you’re comfortable with it, a coding tool like Visual Studio Code is a good home for those.
Use when you have a half-formed idea or project to think through. The AI becomes a critical interviewer, asking one question at a time, until the thing you're trying to think through is clear in your head.
Adapted from Matt Pocock ↗
Use when you want to design a worksheet or handout. It asks what it's for, who it's for, and how the page should flow, then offers layout options and builds the printable page last.
Use when you're on a bigger project over a longer stretch. It interviews you to clarify your thinking and keeps a shared word list and your key decisions in text files, so the project stays consistent as it grows.
Adapted from Matt Pocock ↗
Everything here lives on GitHub — download it all as a zip, or grab one skill from its page above. Questions? Email me at metschfreek@gmail.com.