Evidence Based Classroom Designer

Design or redesign any course, class, or training session using evidence-based instructional principles. Use this skill when a teacher, instructor, or instructional designer wants to improve student retention and achievement through classroom design, course design, quiz design, or active learning strategies — even if they don't mention "retrieval practice" or "spaced repetition." Triggers include: instructor wants to reduce failure rates in a gateway course; teacher finds students forget material within days of a lecture; instructor relies on midterm and final exams as the only assessment; teacher wants to move from passive lecturing to active learning without losing content coverage; instructor wants to close the achievement gap between well-prepared and under-prepared students; course designer wants to embed low-stakes quizzing into a curriculum; teacher wants to raise student performance on Bloom's higher-order thinking levels; instructor wants to redesign student engagement without adding complexity. Works for K-12 teachers, university professors, corporate trainers, and instructional designers. Do NOT use this skill to build a personal study system for a single learner (use retrieval-practice-study-system), to create a practice schedule alone (use practice-schedule-designer), or to audit a single learning activity for difficulty structure (use desirable-difficulty-classifier).

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Install

Claude CodeClawhHubnpxCursorCodexGemini CLI

1. Add marketplace

› /plugin marketplace add bookforge-ai/bookforge-skills

2. Install plugin

› /plugin install make-it-stick@bookforge-skills

3. Use the skill

› /evidence-based-classroom-designer

CC-BY-SA · Open sourceGitHub

Source Book

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel

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Desirable Difficulty Classifier

Classify any learning activity, practice structure, or instructional design element as a desirable difficulty (strengthens encoding) or undesirable difficulty (creates friction without learning benefit). Use this skill when an instructional designer, trainer, teacher, or learner wants to audit a course design, training session, study method, or practice regimen for evidence-based difficulty management — even if they don't use the phrase "desirable difficulty." Applies to onboarding programs, corporate training, academic course design, self-study plans, coaching sessions, and skill development programs. Identifies which of six proven difficulty strategies are present or absent (spacing, interleaving, variation, retrieval, generation, elaboration) and generates specific redesign recommendations. Do NOT use this skill to build a full study schedule (use retrieval-practice-study-system), to assess learner readiness or aptitude, or to evaluate content quality unrelated to difficulty structure.

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Evidence Based Training Designer

Redesign a corporate training program, employee training curriculum, employee onboarding, or in-service training so that learning actually sticks past the end of the session. Use this skill when a company's training is built on lecture-heavy workshops, single-topic day-long blocks, or passive e-learning modules that employees promptly forget; when an L&D team needs to convert a massed-practice curriculum into an evidence-based architecture; when a trainer or workshop design lead is building a new training program from scratch and wants to apply learning science from the start; when onboarding for a sales, technical, or certification role needs to produce durable competence rather than a test-passing event; when management asks why employees cannot apply training back on the job; when training program design needs to show measurable retention and transfer, not just satisfaction scores. This skill applies the corporate training models from Farmers Insurance (interleaved four-domain curriculum, FORE scaffolding, vision-poster goal anchoring, 5-4-3-2-1 sales system), Jiffy Lube (tell-show-do-review certification cycle, 80% threshold, biennial recertification), and Andersen Windows (2-hour job rotation, worker-led improvement, kaizen events) to redesign any training program. It does NOT design individual practice schedules for individual learners — use practice-schedule-designer for that.

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Growth Mindset And Deliberate Practice

Diagnose fixed vs growth mindset patterns and design a deliberate practice protocol for expertise development. Use when someone wants to develop expertise in a skill domain, is struggling to improve despite repeated practice, attributes their performance plateau to talent limits, praises or criticizes someone for being a "natural," says "I'm just not good at this," avoids challenges to protect their reputation, or asks how to get to 10000 hours effectively. Applies Dweck's 4-quadrant model (fixed/growth mindset × performance/learning goal orientation) to classify the learner's current stance, identifies fixed-mindset signals and attribution patterns, then designs a deliberate practice plan using Ericsson's 5 characteristics. Growth mindset is the prerequisite — without it, deliberate practice collapses into avoidance. Together they form a complete talent vs effort expertise-building pathway. Produces: mindset diagnostic report + deliberate practice plan with feedback loops, mental model targets, and practice structure.

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Learning Calibration Audit

Diagnose and correct false confidence in learning mastery using cognitive science research. Use when you feel confident about a topic but keep failing tests, want to audit your metacognition for illusions of knowing, are preparing for a high-stakes assessment and need to verify actual mastery, or suspect your study method is producing Dunning-Kruger overconfidence. Also use for: identifying which of 7 specific cognitive distortions — fluency illusion, hindsight bias, Dunning-Kruger overconfidence, curse of knowledge, false consensus, imagination inflation, social memory contamination — is inflating your self-assessment accuracy; distinguishing reliable mastery indicators (delayed recall, novel problem transfer, peer explanation) from unreliable ones (rereading fluency, immediate recall, familiarity warmth); selecting calibration instruments (self-quizzing, cumulative quizzing, peer instruction) matched to the specific distortions detected; designing a dynamic testing cycle (assess → identify gaps → target practice → retest) as an iterative calibration protocol; and producing a calibration report with a retest schedule. Applies across all learning contexts — exam preparation, professional skill development, corporate training, language learning, technical certification. Works on document sets such as study plans, quiz results, self-assessment notes, and course materials.

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