This interview was originally recorded on August 2, 2023 as a part of our Expert Highlight Series.
Access our blog post, highlighting some of our favorite parts of this conversation.
Interviewer:
Tell us a little bit about your journey and your work at Springboard Collaborative.
Desiree Marks:
I’m a Senior Director of Partner Success at Springboard Collaborative. I’ve been with my organization for almost seven years now. I started my career as a high school special education teacher and really quickly fell in love with the opportunity to just help kids, and help make a difference in their lives.
When I settled into my teaching position, I quickly realized two barriers. The first barrier was, although I wanted to see my students really succeed in their academics, there were all these prior years of education that I just didn’t have an opportunity to make an impact on. So it was not uncommon for me to have students who couldn’t read the directions on an assignment that I provided, or couldn’t spell their last name still. Sometimes I felt like I was up against the wall in terms of how far I could take them in their academic trajectory.
The second barrier was although I was able to really transform those educational experiences in my classroom, oftentimes, those transformative experiences ended in my classroom. Once I left teaching, I was really focused on finding opportunities to help students, not just in the classroom, but outside of the classroom as well. One way to do that is to partner with families, which is why I was really drawn to Springboard’s mission of really deepening those family-educator partnerships to help close that opportunity gap.
Interviewer:
What’s the best advice you have for any districts and schools struggling to engage families?
Desiree Marks:
The best advice I have for districts and schools who are struggling with engaging families is to first determine what problem you’re trying to solve through increasing family engagement. And then to determine whether or not the solutions that you’re proposing communicate to families that they are the catalysts in the solution versus a barrier. So are we thinking about what they can do versus what they can’t? I think that that is a really important way to frame your problem solving that way families will feel valued in the process.
Desiree Marks:
Yeah. Well, as an educator and now a mom of two, I am very passionate about helping young children build their confidence in themselves and in their learning. I really enjoy helping districts, schools, teachers, and families realize their potential in that work. And my expertise is really focused on the program strategy part of that work and helping to design programs that help each of those stakeholders build capacity so that they can realize their potential.
Desiree Marks:
At Springboard Collaborative, my passion manifests into my work on a day-to-day basis. So when we first partner with school districts, I have the opportunity to learn more about what their strategic priorities are, how are they hoping to help improve literacy? How do they support teachers and their coaching and development? What do they think about the family educator partnership currently and where might they there be gaps?
And I get to take all of that information and think about how Springboard can partner with the districts to help really drive the impact that they’re hoping to see. And so as I am designing programs, the most important stakeholder is the student and the family. And so the decisions that we make are really grounded in whether or not the student is affirmed in their learning, whether or not they have an opportunity to grow their joy in reading, and whether or not families are being positioned in a way that they are seen as a valuable tool in in their students’ learning journey.
Interviewer:
Which two to three things do all of your most successful partnerships have in common?
Desiree Marks:
So there are a few commonalities across all of our most successful partners. The first commonalities are more of a readiness factor. So our successful partners have cultivated a data-driven culture within their district, even before they partner with Springboard. And what’s great about that is that practice can then extend into the Springboard programming, and we can coach leaders and teachers to have very open and honest conversations about scholar reading growth. What does a reading assessment say about a child? And is the instruction that we are implementing helping that child grow? If not, what can we do to change it?
Or what do our family engagement metrics say? Okay, based off of that, how else might we engage families? Are there other solutions or other areas of support we can provide to help drive stronger family engagement within our programs? Having that data-driven culture just allows for a smoother launch of programs, but also just a stronger and more authentic partnership with them as well. Because we are vulnerable to say, “This is what we’re thriving in, this is where we still need to find solutions.” And ultimately, we’re doing this in an effort to support the family and the student together.
Another readiness factor that I’ve seen across all of our successful partnerships is an openness to consider how might we deepen relationships with families? I think that it’s common, unintentionally, for families to be seen as unavailable. So when we’re thinking about working in marginalized communities, there’s often assumption that families love their kids, but they’re working three jobs or they have a lot of children so they might not be able to attend these meetings. Our successful partners are constantly reframing what the solution could look like within the context of families. And so when we partner with them and we provide a methodology, they are excited to be able to try something new.
In terms of implementation, when I visit successful partners and I walk into classrooms, there is joy in the classroom. We most often serve students who are reading below grade level or struggling with the reading in school. And our successful partners have teachers who help students build that confidence in their reading and learning. And so when you go into these classrooms, you see hands raised, you hear laughter, you see students reading together, you see them engaged when teachers are reading to them, and it’s definitely wonderful to see. And most typically you see the greatest growth in those schools.
Interviewer:
What have you found to be the most successful ways to engage and communicate with families?
Desiree Marks:
So when thinking about ways to engage and communicate with families, I personally like to start with figuring out whether or not districts already have successful ways of engaging and communicating with families. So are there tools and platforms that they’re using where they can see a higher response rate from families? If so, let’s build on that.
In other cases, when there haven’t been really strong processes set in place, one way to begin that engagement with families is to partner with other spaces such as an afterschool program where families are present to be able to establish those relationships with them. We’ve seen that as a really great strategy in schools where we embed our programs into an existing afterschool program. That way students are comfortable, families are familiar, but then they’re getting that extra literacy instruction, for example, or the extra opportunity to learn about how they can support their students at home.
Interviewer:
What key metrics and success indicators are essential for measuring the long-term impact of a literacy program?
Desiree Marks:
There are several key metrics and success indicators that are eksential for… Oh, eksential is not a word. There are several key metrics and indicators that are essential for measuring the long-term impact of a literacy program. Some of those metrics are early indicators. So for example, student attendance. Are students coming often enough so that they are receiving the optimal dosage of instruction in order for us to accelerate their reading growth?
Family engagement is learning extending beyond the classroom and into the homes. One way we could measure that is through parent engagement in family workshops, for example, or through surveys throughout the program so that families can provide qualitative data around how learning is going at home and whether or not they see an impact in the student growth.
And then of course, it’s really important to have a reliable reading assessment to be able to measure the growth from the beginning of program to the end. If we’re thinking about long-term impact, it’s really important to partner with school districts to determine a reading assessment that can be used over time. So what we don’t want to do is have one reading assessment for the school year and then a different reading assessment for the summer for example. Having a consistent reading assessment will not only provide longitudinal growth, but then you can also measure the growth compared to students who didn’t participate in the literacy program.
Interviewer:
When you visit Springboard classrooms at partner sites, what are a couple of things that signal to you that you’re on track for a successful implementation? What do you look for?
Desiree Marks:
When I visit Springboard classrooms at partner sites, there are a few things that signal to me that we’re on track for a successful implementation. One look for is whether or not instruction is being differentiated. We know that student needs are on a spectrum, and so instruction needs to be differentiated based off of student needs. Additionally, teachers who implement our curriculum with fidelity often have the greatest results because they are tending to the needs of the students using the best instructional resources.
Another look for is how engaged students are with the instructional materials that Springboard provides. Are they using the various tools? Are they logged into Raz-Kids? We know that if students are more engaged in the instruction that they have a higher chance of showing that accelerated reading growth at the end of program.
Interviewer:
How can implementing a literacy program benefit a teacher’s professional development?
Desiree Marks:
School districts provide a lot of professional development for teachers, which is why we love partnering with school districts. They come with a lot of great skills and assets that can contribute to a student’s growth. Partnering with a literacy program can help extend their skillset and build upon their tools to help deepen what it is that they’re doing in the classroom. It provides a different way to deliver instruction. It provides different instructional resources that can support what they’re currently doing and build upon it. And it also helps them figure out other ways to accelerate the reading growth, such as partnering with families to extend the learning outside of the classroom.
Interviewer:
At Springboard Collaborative, each staff member list a favorite book from your childhood on your bios. What was yours and why do you love this book?
Desiree Marks:
My favorite book from childhood is The Rainbow Fish. The Rainbow Fish really resonated with me as a child and now even as an adult because it shares with us the importance of sharing the special parts of you with others. So in The Rainbow Fish, if you’ve read it before, you’ll know that there was this beautiful fish that had a lot of sparkly scales and didn’t want to kind of share that beauty with other fish, but realized that when she did it actually sparked a lot of joy and happiness around those around her.
And so when I think about myself as an educator, myself as a mother, just a person in the world, I like to think about what ways can I contribute to the world and help it be a better place. Whether that’s helping people find their happiness, sharing my happiness, or sharing my joy with others or using the skills, the professional skills that I have to help make an impact and make the world a better place.
Interviewer:
What are some of the things about your work that keep you inspired?
Desiree Marks:
I work for a mission-driven organization, so we want to make a difference in the world. We want to drive impact. At the end of the day though, I think it’s important to remember that the most important stakeholders are not our board members or our funders. And the purpose of having impact is not to show that we’re having impact, that the most important thing is that we are helping students and families and that students and families are real people. And so when we think about our work and how we make decisions about what to do next and how to drive impact, that there are very important people at the end of our work, the recipients of our work that always need to be considered and prioritized.
I think it’s very easy to make decisions because something might look good on paper if that makes sense. But in reality, it might not always hold the best interest of a family member or a student. So if we really stay centered in our work being just the purpose of our work is to serve these communities and to make students feel confident in their learning to become joyous learners and for families to feel like they are the catalyst in their child’s learning, then I think we’re going to do a lot greater good than maybe we ever anticipated doing.