Most teachers who’ve started using Claude are doing something sensible: they type a request, read the response, copy what’s useful. That works. But there are a handful of features built into Claude that most people haven’t touched yet, and some of them can make a meaningful difference to how useful the tool actually is in practice.
This isn’t about squeezing every last drop of productivity out of an AI. It’s about knowing what’s available so you can make an informed choice about whether it’s worth your time.
Here are six features that are worth knowing about.
1. Projects: Set It Up Once, Reuse It Every Time
One of the more frustrating things about using AI tools is that every new conversation starts from zero. You find yourself typing the same contextual information each time: your year group, your curriculum framework, your school’s policies. It gets old quickly.
The Projects feature addresses this. You can create a Project as a kind of permanent workspace, uploading the documents that underpin your planning: schemes of work, curriculum overviews, lesson plan templates. You can also add custom instructions, things like “always suggest differentiation for SEND pupils” or “use the school’s agreed marking language.”
Once that’s set up, every conversation you have inside that Project already has that context baked in. You don’t have to re-explain yourself.
Try it: Start a lesson planning conversation with “Plan a lesson on [topic] using my uploaded scheme of work.” The difference in the output is usually noticeable straight away.
2. Artefacts: From Text to Usable Tool
Sometimes Claude produces a perfectly decent response, and you still feel slightly stuck because it’s a wall of text when what you actually needed was a table, a formatted template, or an interactive quiz. That gap between “the AI wrote something” and “I can use this in my classroom” is where a lot of time gets lost.
Artefacts is designed to help with this. When it’s enabled, Claude can produce visual, formatted outputs in a side panel: a coded quiz you can actually interact with, a structured email template, a tracker laid out as a table rather than a list.
Try it: Describe the lesson you’ve just taught and ask Claude to produce a three-question exit ticket as an Artefact. It’s a small thing, but it saves the reformatting step.
3. Custom Style: Writing That Sounds Like You
If you’ve ever read a piece of AI-generated writing and thought “this sounds like nobody in particular,” that’s a fair criticism. The default output can be generic in tone, which is fine for internal planning but less ideal for newsletters, reports, or parent communications where your voice matters.
Custom Style allows you to upload samples of your own writing so Claude can learn how you write. Are you fairly direct? Do you tend towards warmth and encouragement? Do you use specific vocabulary or sign-off phrases? Once you’ve trained it on your examples, the outputs will reflect your style rather than a neutral default.
Try it: Paste in a few paragraphs from a previous newsletter or report, then ask Claude to draft something new in that style. Compare it to a standard output and see which one actually sounds like you.
4. Extended Thinking: Slower, More Considered Responses
For quick tasks, a fast response is exactly what you want. For more complex decisions, it can actually be unhelpful to get an instant answer without any visible reasoning behind it.
Extended Thinking is a mode that asks Claude to work through its reasoning before giving you a response, effectively showing its workings. This is particularly useful when the stakes are higher: analysing assessment data, thinking through an intervention strategy, or working out how to handle a difficult professional situation.
Try it: Upload some anonymised pupil data and ask Claude, using Extended Thinking, to identify which students may need additional support in a specific area and to suggest some evidence-informed strategies. The depth of response is usually significantly better than a standard prompt.
5. File Upload: Analyse Documents Without the Copy-Paste Nightmare
Most teachers have at some point tried to copy large amounts of text from a PDF into an AI chat window, reformatted it several times, and then given up. The File Upload feature bypasses all of that.
Claude can read PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets, and more. This means you can hand it a lengthy curriculum document, an Ofsted framework, or a class data spreadsheet and ask specific questions about it rather than trying to summarise it yourself first.
Try it: Upload a dense policy or framework document and ask Claude to summarise the changes that will affect your year group or subject next term. It’s a reasonable use of ten minutes.
6. Forking Conversations: Try a Different Angle Without Starting Over
There’s a particular frustration familiar to most people who use AI tools regularly: you get a response that’s almost right, but not quite. Maybe the tone is slightly off, or it’s focused on the wrong aspect. Your options have usually been to write a follow-up prompt and hope for the best, or delete everything and start from scratch.
The conversation forking feature changes this. You can edit any previous message in a conversation, and rather than overwriting what came before, it branches from that point. You can compare both versions and keep whichever works better.
Try it: Ask Claude to explain a concept for your class. If the response isn’t quite right, edit your original prompt to emphasise a different angle, such as using analogies, or a different reading level. Compare the two outputs side by side.
Classroom Application
If you want to start putting some of this into practice, here are three straightforward steps:
- Set up one Project this week. Pick one unit of work you’re currently teaching and upload the relevant planning documents. Add a short custom instruction about your class or your school’s preferred approach. Use it for your next planning task and notice whether the output is more useful than usual.
- Try File Upload with one document you’ve been putting off reading. Most of us have something sitting in our downloads folder that we know we should have read by now. Upload it and ask Claude to pull out the parts most relevant to your role.
- Test Custom Style with a piece of real writing. Find three or four paragraphs you’ve written that you’re pleased with, upload them, and then ask Claude to draft something new in that style. It won’t be perfect, but it will be a lot closer to your voice than the default output.
None of these features require any technical knowledge. They’re all built into the platform and available to explore at your own pace.
Six Claude Features Worth Knowing About (And Actually Using)
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