Adapting the Skills Without the Learning Commons Connector

When you install the open-source K-12 teaching skills outside Claude for Teachers, one thing does not come with them: the Learning Commons Knowledge Graph connector. Inside CfT that connector is included for every teacher, and it does quiet, heavy lifting — it gives Claude academic standards across all 50 states and, beneath each standard, the smaller learning competencies it's built from and the order students typically learn them. The skills were written to use it. Take it away and the skills still run, but the ground they stand on is thinner.

Anthropic says so plainly in the repo: the skills are written to use the Learning Commons KG connector, so adapt them if your environment lacks it. This piece is the "how." The good news is that the fix isn't code — it's grounding. You replace the connector's automatic standards and progressions with material you supply, and the closer you get to what the connector provides, the closer your lessons get to standards-aligned by construction rather than standards-aligned by luck.

What the connector was doing for you

Before you can replace something, you have to know what it did. The Learning Commons connector gives Claude three things the skills lean on. It supplies the standards for a given state and grade — the actual thing a lesson must align to. It supplies the learning progressions — the fine-grained competencies beneath each standard and the sequence students usually master them in, which is what lets the lesson-planning skill scaffold rather than just cover. And through Claude for Teachers it brings in trusted curricula — OpenSciEd for science and Illustrative Mathematics IM v.360 for math — so lessons draw on vetted materials instead of generic content.

Notice that each skill even ships a references/learning-commons-kg.md file. That reference documents how the skill expects to talk to the graph. When the graph isn't there, that file becomes your map of what's missing — read it to see exactly which inputs the skill wanted, then decide how you'll provide them.

The connector isn't a nice-to-have bolted onto the skills. It's the source of the standards and progressions the skills were designed to reason over. Removing it doesn't break the skill; it moves the job of grounding from the tool to you.

Bring your own standards and curriculum

Adapting without the connector comes down to feeding the skill the grounding it can no longer look up. There's a rough hierarchy here, from quickest to most robust:

• Name the standard, exactly. Don't ask for "a fifth-grade fractions lesson." Ask for a lesson aligned to the specific standard code and its wording. Pasting the standard's text into the conversation gives the skill the alignment target it would otherwise pull from the graph — this is the single highest-leverage move.
• Supply the progression yourself. The connector's edge is the sequence beneath the standard. Give the skill the prerequisite skills and the intended learning order — even a few bullet points of "students should already be able to X; this builds toward Y" restores much of the scaffolding logic.
• Point at your curriculum. The skills can optionally align to a teacher's curriculum. If you teach from OpenSciEd, IM v.360, or a district scope-and-sequence, name it and paste the relevant unit or lesson. Grounded beats generated every time.
• Keep a reusable standards file. Rather than re-paste every session, save your grade band's standards and progressions as a local reference document and hand it to the skill each time. You're rebuilding a small, personal version of what the connector automated.
• Verify against the rubrics. The repo's evals/ rubrics tell you what a rigorous, well-aligned lesson looks like per subject. Use them to sanity-check the output — they're how you catch a lesson that drifted because the grounding was thin.

Do the first two and you've recovered most of the value. Do all five and you're close to parity with the connected experience for the grade and subject you care about.

What actually changes in the output

Be honest with yourself about the trade-off so you're not surprised. Without the connector, and with no grounding supplied, the skills degrade to something like "a very strong general-purpose lesson designer." The pedagogy in the skill — the structure, the subject-specific references/, the render-to-file scripts — is all still there. What's missing is the guarantee that the lesson maps to your state's standard and sits correctly in your progression.

As you add grounding, the output climbs back up. Paste the standard and the alignment sharpens. Add the progression and the scaffolding returns. Name the curriculum and the content stops being generic. It's a dial, not a switch. The skill was never doing the standards lookup itself — it was reasoning over what the connector handed it — so handing it the same material by other means gets you most of the way home.

This is also why the differentiation skill adapts gracefully. k12-lesson-differentiation keeps core content consistent across below-, at-, and above-level tiers; that logic doesn't depend on the connector at all. Give it a solid, well-grounded base lesson and it will tier that lesson faithfully whether or not the standards came from the graph or from your clipboard.

A realistic workflow for the disconnected setup

Here's how this looks in practice once. Open a Claude Code session with the skills installed. Paste your standard's exact code and text, a short note on prerequisites and where this sits in the sequence, and — if you have one — the relevant page of your curriculum. Ask the k12-lesson-planning skill for a lesson aligned to that standard. Let it draft the plan and student-facing materials, render them to .docx/.html, and then do what you'd do anyway: read it as the professional in the room and revise.

The second time is faster, because you've already built your standards reference file. By the third lesson you have a personal, reusable grounding kit that turns "adapt the skill" into a two-line setup. That's the whole trick — you're not modifying the skill's logic, you're standing in for a data connector by hand, and you only have to assemble the data once per grade band.

When to just wait for the connector

Adapting is worth it if you're a builder, a coach exploring the skills, or a teacher outside the current CfT eligibility window who wants the tooling now. But be clear-eyed: if you're a verified US K-12 educator, the far simpler path is Claude for Teachers itself, where the connector, the curricula, and the skills all arrive pre-wired and free once verified. The adaptation route is for people who can't or don't want to wait — not a reason to skip CfT if you qualify.

Either way, understanding how to supply grounding by hand is the same knowledge you'll use to build your own teaching skill. Connector-awareness — knowing what your skill needs, and degrading gracefully when it's absent — is one of the most transferable lessons in the whole repo. If you'd rather start from a finished, no-setup tool, marketplace options like Lesson Plan Studio and Concept Explainer are built to work without any connector at all.

Part of the Claude for Teachers series. Related: No CfT Account? Install the K-12 Teacher Skills in Claude Code · Build Your Own Teaching Skill: Lessons from Anthropic's SKILL.md Design. Browse AI tutoring skills or more builder insights.