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isterin/gpa-companion

v0.1.0UNLICENSED

Grosse Pointe Academy's teaching practice as Agent Skills, for grades 1-8. Planning curriculum builds a unit or a term backwards from what students should understand. Supporting students diagnoses what is in a child's way before planning around it. Writing assessments produces quizzes, tests and rubrics that measure the outcome. Communicating with families writes to one parent or all of them, and a human voice skill keeps it sounding like the teacher. A router says which skill owns the request.

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GPA Companion

GPA Companion is Grosse Pointe Academy's teaching practice, written down so that Claude can work the way we do. It helps with the writing and planning that fills a teacher's evenings — a unit, a quiz, a rubric, a plan for one child, a note home — and it asks the questions a thoughtful colleague would ask before it starts drafting. It works in the Claude app, in Cowork, and in Claude Code, for grades 1 through 8.

Installing it

In the Claude app or Cowork. Your Claude administrator publishes GPA Companion to the school's plugin catalogue. Open Customize → Plugins in the sidebar and install GPA Companion. Depending on how the school has set it up, it may already be there. Type / to see what is available.

In Claude Code.

/plugin marketplace add isterin/gpa-companion
/plugin install gpa-companion@gpa-companion-skills

Then just start typing. You do not have to pick anything from a menu — describe what you are trying to do and the right part wakes up on its own.

What it helps with

Reach for it whenFor example, type
You are building or reworking a unit, or laying out a term or a year"Help me plan my fourth grade fractions unit for next month"
One child, or a few, needs something the class plan does not give them — including a child who is far ahead and bored"Three of my students still can't regroup when they subtract"
You need a quiz, a test, an exit ticket, or a rubric"I need an exit ticket for today's fractions lesson"
Something has to be said to one family, or to all of them"Write a note to the Chen family about Marcus's reading"
A draft you have already written reads stiff, generic, or like a machine wrote it"This report card comment sounds like a robot — make it sound like me"
You are not sure which of these your question belongs to"I need to help my kids with fractions" — say it anyway; it will work out which and tell you why

A few things worth knowing about how it behaves:

  • It asks before it drafts. For a child who is stuck, it wants to know what the child actually does when stuck — the specific wrong answers — before it writes a plan, because the plan is completely different depending on the cause. For a note home, it settles what happened, what it means, and what happens next first.
  • It does not bury bad news. A letter that takes three sentences of warmth before it gets to the problem is a letter a parent trusts less next time.
  • It does not know our calendar yet. Our term dates, report card cycle, standards and house voice are meant to live in one file the school fills in, and it is still blank. Until then it will ask you those questions rather than guess at them. If a question feels like something the office should have told it, that is why.
  • It has no connection to any school system. It cannot open Blackboard, a gradebook, or a roster, and it will not pretend to. It will ask you for a class list or a mark rather than inventing one.

What it will not do

It does not diagnose children, and it will say so. If you ask whether a child has dyslexia, or ADHD, or a learning disability, you will get a straight answer: that is a referral, not a plan, and answering it as a plan would put you on record with a judgement that was never yours alone to make. Then it will help with the part that is actually yours, which is usually writing down what you have observed clearly enough that the referral is worth acting on: what the child does, on which task, how often, since when.

The same goes for a child in crisis, a safeguarding worry, or a discipline incident with a parent already on the phone. Those are people, not planning problems. It will say so and stop, rather than quietly turning an urgent thing into a document — the delay would be the harm. It will still help you get the notes down while they are fresh.

This boundary is there to protect you as much as the child.

How much to say about a child

First names or initials are enough. A chat window is not the school's record system, and almost nothing it helps you write needs more than that.

It is built to ask you for the observation rather than the file — "what does Marcus do when he hits a long division problem?" rather than "paste his evaluation" — because the observation is what a good plan actually turns on. You do not need to paste an IEP, an evaluation, or a full student record to get useful help, and it will tell you when something belongs in the school's own system instead of here.

Questions, or something that reads wrong

If a skill gives you something that does not sound like Grosse Pointe Academy, or asks a question the school could have answered for it, that is worth reporting — it is usually a gap in what the school has filled in, and it is fixable.

Tell whoever set this plugin up for you, or open an issue on the repository you installed it from. Either way, paste what you asked for and what came back: the exact wording is what makes it fixable, and it is the part nobody can reconstruct afterwards. You do not need to work out which skill was at fault.

Anyone changing or adding to these skills should start with CONTRIBUTING.md. The known gaps are in docs/follow-ups.md.