No CfT Account? Install the K-12 Teacher Skills in Claude Code
The two K-12 teaching skills ship free inside Claude for Teachers — but they're also open-sourced. Here's the exact git clone, plugin marketplace add, and plugin install sequence to run them in Claude Code today.
Claude for Teachers is free once you're verified — but it's for verified K-12 educators in the US, and district-wide access is still "coming soon." So what if you're a curriculum lead outside that window, an instructional coach in another country, a homeschooling parent, or a builder who just wants to see how these skills work? You don't have to wait for a login. Two of the teaching skills are open-sourced, and you can install them into Claude Code in about a minute.
This is the practical piece: the exact commands to clone github.com/anthropics/k12-teacher-skills, register it as a plugin marketplace, and install the plugin. Inside Claude for Teachers these skills are already present and wired to the Learning Commons Knowledge Graph connector; outside CfT you install them yourself and supply your own grounding. Same skills, different front door.
What's actually in the box
The open repo contains the two skills that anchor the lesson-planning workflow. The first, k12-lesson-planning, builds classroom-ready, standards-aligned lesson plans — optionally aligned to a teacher's curriculum — and drafts both the plan and the student-facing materials for you to revise. The second, k12-lesson-differentiation, adapts an existing lesson into tiered versions (below, at, and above proficiency level) and for specific student needs, keeping the core content consistent across tiers.
Both skills carry references/ folders with per-subject guidance (ELA, math, science, social studies) and a scripts/ folder that renders a lesson into .docx and .html. The repo also ships an evals/ framework with rubrics and a technical write-up of how the skills were evaluated — worth reading whether or not you install anything.
The three commands
Everything below assumes you have Claude Code installed and a working git. Run these from a directory where you're happy to keep a checkout of the repo.
First, clone it:
git clone https://github.com/anthropics/k12-teacher-skills
Next, register the repo's plugin/ directory as a plugin marketplace that Claude Code can install from:
claude plugin marketplace add ./k12-teacher-skills/plugin
Finally, install the plugin from that marketplace:
claude plugin install k12-teacher-skills@k12-teacher-skills
That plugin@marketplace syntax reads as "install the k12-teacher-skills plugin from the k12-teacher-skills marketplace you just added." Here's what each step is doing and why it matters:
| Command | What it does | Why it's a separate step |
|---|---|---|
git clone … | Pulls the full repo — both skills, references/, scripts/, and evals/ — onto your machine | You get the source, not a black box; you can read and adapt every file |
claude plugin marketplace add ./k12-teacher-skills/plugin | Points Claude Code at the local plugin/ directory as an installable marketplace | Claude Code installs skills from marketplaces; this registers the one in the repo |
claude plugin install k12-teacher-skills@k12-teacher-skills | Installs the packaged plugin, making both skills available in your sessions | Separating "add source" from "install" lets you inspect before you enable |
Once the install completes, the k12-lesson-planning and k12-lesson-differentiation skills are available to Claude Code. Ask for a standards-aligned lesson on a topic and grade band, and the planning skill takes over; hand it an existing lesson and ask for tiered versions, and the differentiation skill does its job.
Inside CfT versus on your own machine
The single most important thing to understand before you run these: inside Claude for Teachers, these skills come pre-installed and pre-connected. CfT includes the Learning Commons Knowledge Graph connector for every teacher, which gives Claude academic standards across all 50 states plus the learning progressions beneath them. The skills are written to use that connector, so lessons come out standards-aligned and scaffolded without any setup on the teacher's part.
When you install the skills in plain Claude Code, you're getting the skill logic — the prompts, the subject references, the render scripts — but not automatically the standards graph they were designed to draw on. That's the gap you'll manage yourself.
The skills are written to use the Learning Commons KG connector, and Anthropic is explicit that you should adapt them if your environment lacks it. Practically, that means bringing your own standards and curriculum into the conversation — pasting in your state framework, pointing the skill at your district's scope-and-sequence, or naming the curriculum you teach from. The full walkthrough lives in Adapting the Skills Without the Learning Commons Connector; the short version is that the skills degrade to "very good general lesson design" and climb back toward "standards-aligned by construction" as you feed them better grounding.
A quick sanity checklist before you rely on it
The commands run clean and it feels installed — but if you're going to put a rendered lesson in front of students, confirm a few things first. Check that the skill is actually loaded: start a Claude Code session, ask it to plan a short standards-aligned lesson, and watch for it to invoke the planning skill's structure rather than improvise from scratch. Name your standards explicitly — without the connector, tell the skill exactly which state standard or curriculum unit you're targeting, because specificity is what buys you alignment. Verify the render step too, since the payoff of these skills is a printable artifact: confirm the scripts/ render to .docx/.html produces a file you'd genuinely hand out, then edit it, because you are the accountable professional and the skill only drafts. And read the evals/ rubrics, which tell you what "good" looks like for each subject; even as a user, they're a sharp lens on whether a given lesson is rigorous and pedagogically sound.
Why open-sourcing this matters
It would have been easy to keep these skills locked inside the product. Anthropic instead published them, along with a technical write-up of the evaluations, as part of a set of public goods shipped with Claude for Teachers. That decision changes who the tools are for. A teacher without a CfT account can still run them. A district piloting AI can inspect exactly what the skill does before deploying it — no black box to take on faith. A builder can fork the structure to make a skill for a subject or context Anthropic never covered. And anyone can read the code to understand how a standards-aligned lesson gets assembled, which is its own kind of professional development.
If you're that builder, installing is only the start. The next steps are understanding how the plugin is packaged so you can package your own, and reading the SKILL.md design that makes these skills tick. And if you just want polished, ready-to-run teaching tools without touching a terminal, the marketplace has options like Lesson Plan Studio and Education Agent Skills that live in the same neighborhood.
Three commands. That's the whole barrier between you and the K-12 teaching skills — no account, no waitlist, no verification queue. Clone, add, install, and start planning.
Part of the Claude for Teachers series. Related: Adapting the Skills Without the Learning Commons Connector · The Plugin Pattern: How the K-12 Skills Are Packaged. Browse AI tutoring skills or more builder insights.