Springboard Collaborative: A Cooperative Approach to Boosting Student Literacy

Springboard Collaborative harnesses the strength of parent-teacher collaboration to improve students’ educational outcomes. By combining the power of the classroom and home, the organization creates a network of support to assist students with their reading goals.

Relevant Outcomes:

• Supported over 26,000 students across 314 schools during the 2022-2023 academic year.
• In 10 weeks, students participating in Springboard Collaborative’s afterschool program achieved double the expected reading growth.
• 88% of enrolled families attended family workshops to support their children’s reading goals.

It was great to finally have a program that involved us, the parents, in our children’s education.

Zola and Eric Patrick Springboard Collaborative participants and parents

Bringing the Team Together

Founded and led by teachers, the Springboard Collaborative works to close the literacy gap by equipping families, especially those from marginalized communities, with the tools and resources to help coach reading at home.

Children spend more than 75% of their time at home, and family support of student learning goals is an important predictor for academic success. The Springboard Collaborative team coaches educators and parents on how to help children reach their reading goals by the fourth grade.

How the Partnership Works

The Springboard Collaborative team partners with school districts to run their curriculum, which includes small-group literacy instruction using lessons that align with the Science of Reading. The district partners determine whether they will run the program as a high-impact tutoring program, an afterschool foundational reading supplement program, or a robust summer program.

The organization’s method, called Family-Educator Learning Accelerators (FELAs), includes five to 10-week cycles where families and educators team up to create a plan for assisting students in meeting their goals. During the cycle, the parent-educator team meets weekly or bi-weekly to share skills and support each other’s teaching methods. This allows for a consistent daily learning time when students can practice with their family, their teacher, or on their own

The program strives to have all students read at home for at least 15 minutes per day, which, according to national research, is the “magic number” for reading growth. For every hour a teacher leads a workshop, parents offer 25 hours of learning guidance at home. At the end of the program, parents, teachers, and students measure progress together and celebrate how far they have come as a team.

The Future of Springboard Collaborative

Established in 2011, Springboard Collaborative initially set out to address the reading and learning regression that can occur when students are not engaged in a daily school routine. The team started with a pilot program of 42 students at Pan American Charter School. That summer, the program saw a traditional three-month regression become a 3.2-month reading gain. Today, the Springboard Collaborative afterschool program averages a 4.9-month reading gain.

Springboard Collaborative aims to serve 200,000 students annually by 2033 and is working to make teacher-parent collaboration a standard practice in schools nationwide.

Dive Deeper

Working Together

Parent and teacher collaboration is at the heart of Springboard Collaborative's approach. See and hear how one afterschool program is experiencing the results in classrooms and in homes.