You can use AI to create tiered versions of the same activity — beginner, intermediate, and advanced — so every participant is challenged at the right level without slowing down your whole group.
The Mixed-Level Problem
Almost every live workshop has a range of experience in the room. Some participants are brand new to the topic. Others have been doing it for years and are bored by anything too basic. When you design one activity for everyone, you either lose the beginners (too hard) or lose the advanced students (too easy). Neither group gets full value.
It’s similar to teaching a swimming lesson where half the class can already swim a lap and the other half is afraid to put their face in the water. One set of exercises doesn’t work for both. You need different entry points that lead to the same learning outcome.
How AI Tiered Activity Design Works
Give Claude or ChatGPT your activity idea and ask it to create three versions: one for beginners who are just getting started, one for intermediate participants who have some experience, and one for advanced participants who want to go deeper. For example: “I’m running an activity where participants practice writing AI prompts for their courses. Create three versions — beginner (simple fill-in-the-blank), intermediate (write from scratch with a template), advanced (write and critique a peer’s prompt).”
You end up with three activities in one prompt session. During the workshop, you can assign versions by self-selection (“pick the one that feels like a stretch, not a struggle”) or by asking participants where they are in their journey. Self-selection almost always works — people are honest about where they are when there’s no judgment attached.
What This Means for Educators
As a trainer or coach, tiered activities let you run one inclusive session instead of three separate ones. Advanced participants stay challenged and don’t check out. Beginners don’t feel embarrassed by the pace. And when you debrief, hearing different levels of response from the room creates its own learning — beginners hear what’s possible, advanced participants remember where they started.
What to Do Next
Take the next hands-on activity in your curriculum and paste it into Claude with this request: “Create three versions of this for beginner, intermediate, and advanced participants.” Compare what comes back. The tiered approach is something you can build into every session going forward, and AI makes drafting all three versions take the same time it used to take to design one.