Amplify Desmos Math is a new, curiosity-driven program that supports teachers in building a classroom of students who see themselves as math people and gain lifelong math proficiency.

Through a structured approach to problem-based learning, we help teachers create a collaborative math community with students at its center. The program pairs problems students are eager to solve with clear, easy-to-follow instructional guidance that leaves space for teacher creativity. This flexibility allows teachers to build on students' curiosity to develop lasting grade-level understandings.

Our philosophy

The research behind our approach

As we developed Amplify Desmos Math, we asked ourselves: "How can we support teachers in creating a collaborative classroom of learners excited about math?"

With that question in mind, we built the program around four core tenets:

Picture a classroom where students are so eagerly engaged in a lesson, they wish it wouldn’t end. The room is buzzing with the sounds of natural curiosity. There’s an audible groan from students when their screens are paused. This is what an Amplify Desmos Math classroom looks and sounds like. This is math that motivates.

Our curriculum supports social classrooms, invites mathematical creativity, and evokes wonder, empowering students to see themselves and their classmates as having brilliant mathematical ideas.

The program thoughtfully combines conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and application. Each lesson is designed to tell a story by posing problems that invite a variety of approaches before guiding students to synthesize their understanding of the learning goals.

The Teacher Edition provides guidance for teachers to anticipate and monitor strategies students may use, select and sequence students’ ideas, and orchestrate productive discussions to help students make connections between their own ideas and those of their classmates.

Students first take an active role in developing their own ideas, then synthesize those ideas as a class. To guide the learning process, students see each other’s thinking, engage in conversations, and connect with each other through using math to make sense of the world. This fuels classroom conversations and a shared understanding of math.

Rather than evaluating ideas as simply right or wrong, Responsive Feedback shows students what their ideas mean in context and offers opportunities for students to learn from each other’s responses. This feedback encourages students to explore different strategies and make sense of a variety of responses, so that student ideas drive the learning process.

Tasks in each lesson are thoughtfully sequenced so that all students can engage with the math each day without any roadblocks. Every lesson includes suggestions for accessibility and differentiation to support, strengthen, and stretch student understanding.

We also provide additional resources that integrate seamlessly with core instruction, including a suite of assessments, tailored practice resources that adjust to student learning, and other intervention solutions. Cohesive differentiation and intervention resources support and challenge students on their path toward deeper understanding of the learning goals, ensuring that all students can gain or stretch beyond grade-level math.

Amplify Desmos Math is designed to foster a student-centered environment that promotes student engagement and results in increased learning opportunities. Traditionally, mathematics classrooms have been teacher-centered. In these kinds of classrooms, the work tends to be passive, resulting in students who are disengaged from classroom activities and learning in general. Many of these students are not only disengaged, but tend to believe that math is not for them.

To reverse these kinds of outcomes in the classroom, it’s important to create a student-centered classroom, where students are engaged in learning and can picture themselves as capable of doing math. In 2014, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics set forth guiding principles for teaching mathematics based on their research. These practices include Teaching and Learning, Access and Equity, Curriculum, Tools and Technology, and Assessment. Below we describe each of these principles and how they have guided the design of Amplify Desmos Math.

An excellent mathematics program requires effective teaching that engages students in meaningful learning through individual and collaborative experiences that promote their ability to make sense of mathematical ideas and reason mathematically.

We embedded the structures laid out by Peg Smith and Mary K. Stein’s 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions into the Amplify Desmos platform and lesson structures to ensure that teachers could effectively engage students in meaningful and productive mathematics conversation. Additionally, Amplify Desmos Math relies on collaboration and lots of hands-on, curiosity-driven learning to help students dive into problems on their own and develop skills in expressing their perspectives. Lessons often include collaborative use of manipulatives, movement around the classroom, and other social features designed to support students in seeing each other’s brilliant ideas.

An excellent mathematics program requires that all students have access to a high-quality mathematics curriculum, effective teaching and learning, high expectations, and the support and resources needed to maximize their learning potential. This commitment reflects a broader push within the educational community to foster a culture of equity, ensuring that every student has the opportunity to thrive as a learner and practitioner of mathematics.

The differentiation of Amplify Desmos Math extends beyond academic differences to encompass variations in student motivation, interests, and identity. Understanding and addressing these aspects are essential for creating inclusive learning environments where all students feel valued and empowered to succeed. We incorporated Universal Design for Learning guidelines (Engagement, Representation, Action & Expression) into each lesson and developed a platform that is intuitive and easy-to-use for all learners. To support multilingual/English learners, Amplify Desmos Math incorporates research-based Mathematical Language Routines by providing language modality strategies like sentence frames where appropriate, both in the teacher language provided for each task and in the differentiation support section found throughout the program.

An excellent mathematics program includes a curriculum that develops important mathematics along coherent learning progressions and develops connections among areas of mathematical study and between mathematics and the real world.

The Amplify Desmos Math curriculum is based on the same scope and sequence as Illustrative Mathematics’® IM K–12 Math™, which is highly rated for its focus, coherence, and rigor (specific IM EdReports ratings and details can be found here). Materials in Amplify Desmos Math assess and give all students extensive work with grade-level content to meet the full intent of grade-level standards. Assessments are aligned to grade-level standards, including all quizzes and end-of-unit assessments. Lessons give students meaningful experiences with grade-level content and additionally include practice problems that serve to reinforce understanding of grade-level concepts. Regarding coherence, the materials address the major clusters of the grade, have supporting content connected to major work, make connections between clusters and domains, and have content from prior and future grades connected to grade-level work.

Each course additionally addresses each aspect of rigor in mathematics. Lessons develop students’ conceptual understanding by inviting them into familiar or accessible contexts and asking them for their own ideas before presenting more formal mathematics. Several structures in the curriculum support procedural fluency:

Students also have opportunities to apply what they’ve learned to new mathematical or real-world contexts. Concepts are often introduced in context and most units end by inviting students to apply their learning.

An excellent mathematics program integrates the use of mathematical tools and technology as essential resources to help students learn and make sense of mathematical ideas, reason mathematically, and communicate their mathematical thinking.

Multiple studies on the use of feedback in education have shown that rich feedback provided during the instructional cycle is most effective in teaching students new skills. This type of feedback not only shows whether a student’s answer is right or wrong, but also helps students understand the specific mistakes they made, see the math in those mistakes, realize why they made those mistakes, and know what they can do to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

Digital lessons in Amplify Desmos Math incorporate an interactive Responsive Feedback feature that shows students the meaning of their own thinking, providing students with the kind of high-information that is proven to help students most. Lessons allow students to input different variables in a problem so that they can see how correct and incorrect answers impact a solution. The playful nature of the lessons allows students to explore their mathematical thinking with autonomy and discover why certain answers are incorrect or correct.

For example, in the Grade 3 Puppy Pile lesson, students extend their understanding of scaled picture graphs to scaled bar graphs. As students represent data on scaled bar graphs and compare the graphs, they consider how the same data can look different when represented on graphs with different scales. This mathematical understanding is strengthened as individual items build into the accurate bar graph for a student to compare against their response. Students are able to adjust the scale of the graphs and visually see the impact of the different scales.

The student digital platform is highly interactive and allows students to respond in a variety of ways. Students show their understanding through digital interactions, discussion, open-ended text responses, sketches, and digital manipulatives. When appropriate, teachers can allow students to see others’ responses to spark discussion. Digital tools for teachers are available for classroom use every day, while student devices are recommended for an age-appropriate number of lessons.

An excellent mathematics program ensures that assessment is an integral part of instruction, provides evidence of proficiency with important mathematics content and practices, includes a variety of strategies and data sources, and informs feedback to students, instructional decisions, and program improvement.

Research shows that the most effective forms of assessment support student learning. These assessments are integrated into the learning experience, provide immediate knowledge of student performance, and give students prompt feedback about their performance. Amplify Desmos Math provides many ways for educators to understand what their students know and provide the support needed for students to progress in their math-learning journeys.

Benchmark and progress monitoring assessments in the program are powered by integrated mCLASS® Assessments. These assessments measure students’ knowledge and provide teachers with targeted, actionable insights based on assessment results. mCLASS Assessments provide instructional recommendations that are linked to core instruction and supplemental practice and intervention resources, ensuring that each assessment contributes to improving students’ mathematical understanding. This connection between assessment and instruction results in an impactful assessment system that aids Multi-Tiered Systems of Support in the classroom and ultimately helps students learn.

Amplify Desmos Math also includes unit- and lesson-level assessments and additional knowledge checks, available in both print and digital formats, that keep teachers apprised of what their students know. When administered through the Amplify Desmos Math digital platform, educators are able to see a student’s approach to solving math problems in real time, giving educators an opportunity to provide immediate feedback that students can use as they learn new skills. Built-in teacher supports help teachers use students’ partial or unfinished learning to have productive conversations in the classroom, spurring occasion for group learning, which studies show optimize math learning in the classroom.