isterin/gpa-companion
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.
Write to a child's parents, or to every family in the class. Use when a teacher needs to tell one family something about their child — progress, a concern, a behaviour incident, good news worth sending — or to send the whole class a newsletter, a unit overview, a trip letter, or a reminder. Works out what happened, what it means, and what happens next before drafting, delivers hard news plainly rather than burying it, and never singles a child out in a message going to everyone.
Plan what a class gets taught and in what order. Use when a teacher wants to build or rework a unit, lay out a term or year as a scope and sequence, turn a set of standards into something teachable, or tighten a unit whose activities and assessments have drifted apart. Settles the understanding a unit is for, and the evidence that would show it, before any lesson is chosen, schedules review rather than teaching each topic once, and flags any outcome that is taught but not assessed or assessed but not taught. For grades 1 through 8.
Plan for one child, or a few named children, who need something the class plan does not give them. Use when a student is stuck, falling behind, missing a prerequisite, losing confidence, or so far ahead they have stopped working. Finds out what is actually in the way before planning anything — a missing prerequisite, a conceptual gap, a fluency problem, or something that is not the subject at all — then sets out a small number of targeted moves, what to watch for, and when to check whether it worked. Covers extension for students who need more, not only catch-up.
Use at the start of any teaching conversation to decide which Grosse Pointe Academy skill applies and route to it. Applies when a teacher brings a class to plan, a unit or term to lay out, a subject that is not landing, a child who is stuck or bored, a quiz or test or rubric to write, a note that has to go home to one family or to all of them, a set of report card comments to get through, or a draft that reads stiff and needs to sound like a person. Also applies when a teacher has a piece of teaching work and is not sure which of these skills it belongs to, when a concern turns out to be past what a classroom plan can address, and when a teacher is unsure how much to say about a particular child. Routes to the skill that owns the request rather than doing that skill's work.
Write something that measures what students actually learned. Use when a teacher needs a quiz, a test, an exit ticket, a set of practice questions, or a rubric for a project or piece of writing. Starts from what the assessment is for, because a check to find out who needs reteaching and a test that produces a grade are different instruments, then builds items matched to the outcome with distractors drawn from real misconceptions, an answer key, and rubric levels that describe observable differences. For grades 1 through 8.
Rewrite school writing that sounds machine-generated so it reads like the person who sent it, without changing what it says. Use when a note home, a report card comment, a newsletter, or a message to families reads stiff, generic, padded, or oddly formal, when a teacher says a draft sounds like AI wrote it, and before any letter to a parent goes out. Also use on a teacher's own draft that is not landing. Keeps every fact, invents nothing, and does not soften news that should stay plain.