Coteach AI helps teachers prepare mathematics lessons, create practice materials, and develop supports for students who need additional help. Its current focus is IM v.360, the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum. Teachers using these materials can ask for assistance tied to particular lessons, activities, and learning goals.
What interests me about this approach is the connection between AI assistance and an existing curriculum. Teachers need resources that fit the mathematics students are learning and the representations they have already encountered. Coteach is designed around that need. This review covers the platform at coteach.ai, based on its current public documentation.
What is Coteach AI?
Coteach is an AI teaching assistant incubated at Teaching Lab. It supports curriculum implementation, with an emphasis on helping teachers differentiate instruction while preserving the purpose of their instructional materials. Its intended users include teachers, instructional coaches, and school teams.
Coteach is also IM Certified. According to its certification announcement, Illustrative Mathematics reviewed the platform and determined that its planning support, scaffolds, and materials reflect the curriculum’s values and structure. That certification concerns curriculum alignment; teachers still need to review individual outputs before using them.
Coteach AI features at a glance
| Feature | What it supports |
|---|---|
| IM v.360 curriculum access | Preparing lessons using curriculum materials, teacher guides, and support resources |
| Lesson preparation | Exploring activity purposes, prerequisite knowledge, and possible misconceptions |
| Differentiated practice | Generating additional questions, reviews, and extension activities |
| Targeted scaffolds | Creating supports around identified learning needs |
| Mathematical diagrams | Producing visual representations for explanations and practice |
| Reusable Skills | Saving instructions for recurring planning routines |
| Exports | Moving generated materials into Google Docs, Google Slides, or PDF |
| School and district plans | Providing shared access, onboarding, analytics, and professional learning |
These functions are described across Coteach’s product pages, prompt library, and feature announcements.
Related: Top AI Lesson Plan Tools for Teachers
Preparing and understanding lessons
One useful application is lesson internalization: working through a lesson so you understand its mathematical purpose before teaching it.
Coteach’s prompt library includes requests about the purpose of activities, how they connect to the lesson’s closing assessment, prerequisite skills, and likely student misconceptions. Teachers can also ask for possible student responses to help prepare classroom discussion.
For example, a teacher could examine the original task, solve it independently, and then ask Coteach to suggest alternative student approaches. Comparing these suggestions with the teacher’s own analysis could help identify questions to ask during instruction.
I would keep that independent preparation in the process. Working through the mathematics gives teachers a basis for judging whether an AI explanation is accurate and instructionally useful.
Creating additional practice
Coteach can generate practice connected to a lesson’s objectives and activities. Its suggested prompts cover progressively more difficult questions, reviews of prerequisite skills, and extensions for students ready to go further.
A useful request would specify what should stay consistent and what should change. For instance:
Create three additional practice questions for this activity. Keep the same mathematical goal and representation, vary the numbers, and explain what each question assesses.
This is a suggested prompt, not a tested output. The teacher should check the questions and solutions, including whether the progression introduces an unintended difficulty.
Extra practice is most useful when it responds to a particular need. A student struggling to interpret a representation may need a different explanation before another set of questions.
Building targeted scaffolds
Coteach’s scaffolding guidance recommends identifying likely misconceptions or gaps in prerequisite knowledge before requesting support. Teachers can then generate reference guides, structured organizers, and scaffolded practice, and refine the suggestions through follow-up requests.
Consider a volume lesson where some students understand the concept but struggle with multiplication. A teacher could ask for a short fluency support connected to the lesson. Students who are still developing the idea of volume might need a visual reference or a different representation.
Those are different instructional needs. Describing them precisely gives the AI a better starting point.
The question I would use when reviewing a scaffold is: Does this help students engage with the mathematical thinking, or does it complete that thinking for them? A support can make a task easier to access while still leaving students responsible for reasoning.
Generating mathematical diagrams
Coteach supports mathematical visuals, including diagrams embedded in practice materials and visual aids for instruction. Its documentation gives examples such as double number lines and anchor charts linked to unit learning goals.
There is also a Coteach connector for creating diagrams within Claude. Its announcement lists representations including number lines, tape diagrams, arrays, area models, coordinate planes, and fraction models. The announcement distinguishes this existing diagram capability from broader resource and assessment workflows described as future development.
Check every generated visual. Labels, scales, proportions, and the relationship between the diagram and the problem all matter. A visually clear image can still communicate an incorrect mathematical relationship.
Saving recurring instructions with Skills
Coteach’s Skills feature lets teachers save reusable instructions across chats. Its examples include a consistent format for multilingual learner supports, a preferred lesson structure, and shared school or district planning priorities.
This could be useful when you repeatedly request the same kind of resource. You might save instructions asking for a brief vocabulary section, a visual support, and prompts that encourage students to explain their reasoning.
Review those instructions periodically. A routine that works well for one class or topic may need adjustment elsewhere.
How to use Coteach in lesson preparation
A practical starting workflow is:
- Read and work through the original lesson. Identify the learning goal and the reasoning students should demonstrate.
- Choose a specific planning need. This might be anticipating misconceptions, creating extra practice, or designing a scaffold.
- Provide lesson context. Identify the relevant grade, unit, lesson, or activity and describe the support needed.
- Review and refine the response. Check mathematical accuracy, language, difficulty, and curriculum fit.
- Export the materials. Coteach’s homepage lists Google Docs, Google Slides, and PDF exports for editing, printing, and sharing.
After teaching, review what students actually did with the resource. Their responses provide better evidence of its usefulness than the appearance of the generated material.
Is Coteach AI free?
Coteach has Free, Premium, and school or district options. The Free plan includes limited access, saved chats, IM lesson adjustments, and Google Docs or PDF exports. Access is subject to usage limits and capacity.
Premium advertises ten times more usage and early access to features. The pricing page displayed $15 per month, billed annually, when checked on October 8, 2026. The retrieved page did not specify the currency. School and district pricing requires contacting the company and includes additional services such as onboarding, single sign-on, analytics, and professional learning. Check the pricing page before subscribing.
Privacy and limitations
Coteach says many features can be used without identifiable student data. Its privacy policy states that educator and student data are not used to train AI models, and that data is stored in the United States. It also describes limited sharing with service providers and research partners under specified conditions. Teachers should consult their school’s requirements before uploading student information.
The main limitation for some readers will be curriculum fit. Coteach’s current positioning centres on IM v.360. Teachers using Canadian provincial curricula or other mathematics programs should assess whether its materials match their outcomes, terminology, and instructional sequence.
My assessment is that Coteach is worth exploring for teachers already using Illustrative Mathematics, especially those creating recurring practice and differentiated supports. Begin with one familiar lesson and use the free access to judge the accuracy and usefulness of its suggestions. This is a documentation-based review; I have not tested the platform directly.
