Assistant Mode turns your Bloom into a productivity tool for teaching tasks. Instead of guiding a student with Socratic questions, the AI gives you direct, practical drafts: multiple choice worksheets, marking guides, lesson plans, parent emails, and more. It is the same Bloom you use with students, just pointed at your workflow.
You access it from the chat input area inside any Bloom where you have an educator or manager role. You can either click one of the Educator tools chips above the input box, or open the full library by clicking View all tools.
What Assistant Mode is
Bloom has two modes for the AI conversation:
- Socratic tutor (default for students): the AI asks leading questions, refuses to reveal assessment answers, and applies your Bloom’s pedagogical settings.
- Assistant Mode (for educators): the AI behaves as a teaching assistant. It skips topic preprocessing, content retrieval, content moderation, blocked-question checks, and pedagogical controls, so you get direct drafts back instead of being tutored.
Under the hood, Assistant Mode runs with this instruction to the AI: “You are an AI teaching assistant helping an educator with their professional tasks. The educator has selected a specific tool to help them with their work.” It is told to clarify scope with one or two targeted questions, then produce content that is practical, actionable, and ready to use with minimal adaptation.
Who can use it
Educator tools appear automatically when your Bloom-level role is educator or manager. Students do not see the toolbar, and their conversations always run in Socratic mode regardless of any toggle. If you are an educator testing the student experience, turn on Student mode from the sidebar; the educator tools will hide while you are in it.
Step 1: Open the educator tools
Open any Bloom you have educator access to and start a new conversation. Above the message input you will see a row labelled Educator tools (or Starred tools once you favourite some) with four quick-access chips and a View all tools button.
The default chips are Create multiple choice worksheet, Give student feedback, Draft parent message, and Create lesson plan. Once you star tools, the chip row shows your starred set instead.
Step 2: Pick a tool
Click any chip to fire that tool immediately, or click View all tools to open the full Educator Tools library. The library groups tools into six categories:
- Plan & align: course blueprints, lesson plans, learning outcomes, standards alignment.
- Teach & facilitate: teacher scripts, Socratic questioning ladders, misconception diagnosis, faded worked examples, analogies, lesson hooks.
- Create materials: question banks, multiple choice worksheets, short answer quizzes, problem sets, reading guides, presentation outlines.
- Assess & grade: rubrics, marking guides, student feedback, comment banks, equivalent assessment versions, assessment blueprints.
- Support & differentiate: differentiation ideas, support plans, extension activities.
- Communicate & admin: parent messages, student or colleague emails, LMS announcements.
- Reflect & improve: assessment results analysis, lesson reflections.
Use the search bar at the top to filter by title, description, or category. Click the star icon on any card to pin it to your quick-access row.
Step 3: Iterate with the AI
Most tools open with a clarifying question or two. For example, the Create short answer quiz tool starts with “Let’s create a short answer quiz.” and the AI will ask for your subject, year level, topic, and how many questions you want before generating anything.
The more detail you give upfront, the closer the first draft will be to usable. A prompt like “Year 11 Biology, 8 questions on cell respiration, mix of recall and application, target 30 minutes” will produce something you can edit lightly. A bare “Make me a quiz” will trigger the clarifying questions first.
After the first draft, ask for refinements directly: “Swap question 4 for something on the light-dependent reactions,” or “Rewrite the rubric in three bands instead of four.” The conversation stays open until you start a new chat.
Free-form chat and the Guided toggle
You do not have to pick a tool. You can also just type into the chat as an educator and ask for what you need. By default, your messages run in normal (direct-answer) mode because educators see a Guided toggle in the input bar that is off. Hovering it shows the tooltip “Enable Guided Mode to get Socratic questioning instead of direct answers.”
Turn Guided on when you want to preview the student experience for a topic, for example to check what hints the AI would offer on a tricky question. Turn it off (the default) when you want straight answers and drafts.
Common issues
I don’t see the educator tools row
Check three things: your Bloom-level role is educator or manager (not student); you are not in Student mode; and you are in a normal chat, not a quiz attempt or feedback session. Switching out of Student mode from the sidebar usually fixes it.
The AI didn’t use my course materials
Assistant Mode skips knowledge base retrieval on purpose, so the AI is faster and more flexible for general teaching tasks. Paste the relevant excerpt into your message, or attach the document directly, when you need outputs grounded in specific source text.
The AI keeps asking clarifying questions
The Assistant Mode prompt instructs it to clarify scope before generating. Include subject, year level, topic, length, and intended use in your first message and it will skip straight to the draft.
What’s next
- Tune how the student-facing tutor behaves in Socratic mode → Change the teaching persona
- Understand the Socratic approach and when to override it → How the Socratic approach works
- Open Bloom and try a tool now → Manage Blooms