Read to Lead

During middle school, student engagement declines dramatically due to lack of relevant curriculum and approaches that support the whole child. This decline in engagement is linked to low academic achievement, low literacy rates, and missed opportunities for students to prepare for their future within and beyond the classroom. 

Read to Lead helps middle school educators re-engage students and address the most intractable challenges facing their students, which have been exacerbated by the prolonged effects of the pandemic:

• Low Literacy Skills: 80% of 8th graders living in communities experiencing high poverty are below proficiency in reading. Yet, even as little as six extra minutes of reading per day can make the difference between meeting and not meeting grade-level college- and career-readiness benchmarks (2018, Renaissance Learning).

• Lack of SEL & 21st Century Skills: According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation (2014, Gallup), more than one-half of new entrants to the workforce are poorly prepared in problem solving, critical thinking, leadership, and collaboration.

• Broken Career Pathways: Middle school youth need opportunities to see themselves in the workforce. They need experiences that help them recognize what they like to do, what they are skilled at, where they belong, and what they need to learn to achieve their career goals. This window of opportunity is brief: exploring potential career identities often plateaus in 8th grade (2019, Connected Learning Alliance). 

• Lack of Culturally Relevant Curriculum: Taking a leadership role in a professional community is a profound experience for the young people who participate in our programs. Read to Lead puts students from all backgrounds into positions of power and authority, with game characters that reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. This combination of student agency and diverse representation matters deeply in giving Black, Latinx, and low-income students the ability to see themselves as leaders today and in their future careers.

While there are many edtech tools on the market, only Read to Lead provides educators with a free and holistic model for solving the middle school engagement and achievement problem—combining literacy, social emotional learning (SEL), and career exploration at the critical middle school moment.

In Read to Lead, students become “The Boss” of a virtual workplace and apply literacy, life, and career skills to navigate their day at work. They must think critically, lead a diverse team, and solve complex problems. Our scenario-based learning games are grounded in educational research and offer students opportunities to make difficult choices, take risks, share failures and successes, and discuss challenging problems with peers. In the process, students take on increasing responsibility for their learning, gain confidence, and see new possibilities for themselves in the world of work.

In 2020-2021 on average, Read to Lead students practiced vocabulary and close reading skills by reading 32,000 words and spending 5 hours and 41 minutes reading and leading through their “day at work.” Participating students developed critical thinking and problem-solving skills by making an average of 72 workplace decisions as they led their team and solved problems in their virtual workplace.

Read to Lead learning games are set across four career worlds, with a fifth in development:

• In After the Storm, students are Editor-in-Chief of a digital magazine and face realistic challenges after a city has been hit by a major hurricane.

• In Community in Crisis, students take on the role of Director of the Common Ground Community Center and must keep the Center’s operations running while addressing urgent community needs.

• In Vital Signs, as the Medical Director of a family clinic, students lead a diverse team and balance the requirements of urgent patient care with managing the medical center.

• NEW: In 2021, we created a new series of four Read to Lead learning games, Community Pharmacy. We partnered with the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy to create compelling and realistic scenarios where students are in charge of leading a community pharmacy, such as  providing advice to a patient struggling with the decision to receive a vaccine. After a successful pilot of the learning games with 90 students in November 2021, where 85% of students surveyed shared that the games were fun, engaging, and easy to use, the new series launched in February 2022 to our national community of educators and students.  A playable demo of Community Pharmacy is available here: A Puzzling Prescription

• NEW: In 2022, leveraging the model of collaborative game creation we developed with UPitt, we kicked off a partnership with BlackRock to create a series of four new Read to Lead learning games set in financial services that will launch in October 2022. 

In addition to a uniquely engaging game-based learning model, Read to Lead provides teachers with lesson plans, robust curriculum resources, embedded assessments, real-time data on student progress, and project-based learning resources. We also prioritize innovations that enable teachers to effectively support all students, such as translation features to support English Language Learners, offline projects to help students take the leadership skills from the game into their communities, and new features support SEL skills development that are especially important in the wake of the extended school closures during the pandemic.

We offer all our learning games, resources, and curriculum at no charge to students and educators across the country through our Read to Lead platform. In addition, at partner school and organization sites in New York City, we provide ongoing instructional coaching and support to both deliver impact in specific high need communities and inform the further development of our learning model in partnership with the students and educators who we serve.

Read to Lead serves middle school educators and students in high need communities across the United States. In the 2020-21 school year, Read to Lead served approximately 50,000 middle school students across all 50 states. 82% of Read to Lead students nationwide attend Title I schools, 26% identify as Black, 26% identify as Latino/a, and 16% identify as Indigenous or other people of color.  Through philanthropic support, we offer our learning games, resources, curriculum, and professional development at no charge, and we focus on supporting equity and historically underserved student populations.  

Middle school educators need free, research-based tools that are proven to engage students holistically— encouraging them to build core literacy, life, and career skills through relevant and respectful content. The Read to Lead platform provides educators with relevant, evidence-based learning games, lessons and student performance data to supplement their existing curriculum. Read to Lead helps teachers engage students deeply, and deliver rigorous reading instruction in a variety of learning environments. Read to Lead combines exploratory game play and informal reading and writing opportunities with embedded assessment activities—all in the immersive context of a day at work—while sending real-time data on student progress to an easily-accessible teacher dashboard. 

Middle school students need learning experiences that empower them to develop core academic skills and social-emotional competencies, while also inspiring new possibilities for themselves in their careers and communities. By inviting students to be the boss in virtual workplaces, Read to Lead offers young leaders opportunities to practice and apply literacy, life, and career skills. 

Our leadership team has led the design of Read to Lead learning experiences and brings extensive expertise in educational product development, learning science, professional development and educator support, and curriculum that supports literacy skill development and social emotional learning.

We design Read to Lead in close collaboration with students and teachers, including through partnerships with schools, student and teacher focus groups, user testing, and feedback loops integrated into our platform. We design career scenarios in partnership with real-world leaders to ensure compelling and authentic learning. 50,000

Based on feedback, we prioritize innovations and improvements such as translation features for English Language Learners, project-based learning resources, features to support SEL skill development, and a live webinar series with inspiring real world leaders to engage students more deeply in career exploration.

Read to Lead is applying to Solve in order to maximize the impact of our unique and innovative learning model.

We anticipate the nine months of personalized support from Solve staff and the cross-sector community network will help us accelerate our work and scale our solution. Specifically, we would value the Solve community’s partnership in addressing the potential barriers of market competition and financial sustainability, leveraging the expertise gained from working with other successful high growth organizations.

While there are many edtech tools on the market, only Read to Lead provides teachers with a holistic model for solving the middle school engagement and achievement problem—combining literacy, social emotional learning, and career exploration at the critical middle school moment. No other solution combines rigorous reading and writing experiences, game-based learning in immersive workplace scenarios, and opportunities to apply academic and SEL skills. 

In 2020 RTL learning platform received a 5-star rating in an independent review by Common Sense Education: “A great middle school choice for integrating literacy skills with real-life scenarios and careers. Read to Lead is a rare combination of simulation, reading skill practice, and SEL integration. Through the context of managing staff, overseeing services and resources, and being involved in the community, students apply their reading and writing skills to several different career fields, all while interacting with a diverse cast of characters.”

We can contribute catalytic impact because there are few existing options that measure the development of SEL skills and early career exploration effectively. The unique scenario-based model of Read to Lead creates data sets on student decision making and that can be leveraged to better understand student formation of 21st Century skills and career identities and aspirations.

In addition, by scaling our learning model and sharing the learning science and  practices that make it successful, we can contribute to demonstrating the importance of immersive, culturally relevant, multimodal learning experiences that can drive significantly better student learning outcomes than traditional models.

Read to Lead has an interrelated set of three impact goals. Through our holistic approach, empower middle school youth to improve their literacy skills, develop their social emotional competencies, and expand their awareness of career opportunities. By combining these three outcomes, we have a transformative impact during the critical middle school moment - providing young leaders with opportunities to both develop new aspirations for their futures and the skills they’ll need to achieve their ambitions academically, in their careers, and in their communities. Our goals over the next five years is to dramatically expand the number of teachers and students who Read to Lead makes an impact for, and to continue to use a learning science approach to continuously improving and innovating on our learning platform in partnership with the communities we serve.

The impact of the pandemic has reinforced the importance of key elements of our strategy: continuing to provide our professional development in virtual and on-demand formats, prioritizing investments that make the Read to Lead learning platform easier for teachers to use with impact, and creating new learning games and experiences that meet the demand from Read to Lead educators. Our main strategic priorities to achieve our impact goals are:

(1) Expand our community of educators and youth by combining a scalable model for support of educators, partnerships with schools and community organizations, and investment in marketing that increases awareness of and engagement with Read to Lead. The focus of our expansion will be to reach youth who are most at risk of lacking access to academic and career pathways. 

We will increase awareness, engagement, and retention of Read to Lead educators through initiatives that include the national Million Words Read Challenge (now in its fourth year), our Educator Leaders community (a group of 30 of our most dedicated teachers who are helping us build awareness as trusted ambassadors for Read to Lead), targeted content bundles that increase the relevance of Read to Lead content (for example, a collection of learning games grouped by specific reading skills that helped teachers meet skill development gaps that resulted from COVID), and active social media channels.

(2) Create the next generation of Read to Lead learning experiences that deliver rigorous reading and writing experiences, opportunities to learn within immersive workplace scenarios, and opportunities to apply academic and SEL skills. 

Building on the proven Read to Lead learning model and informed by the replicable game development process created in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh that resulted in new pharmacy learning games, we will focus on:

• Expanding new career worlds, including by creating a new series of four learning games set in financial services and developed in partnership with BlackRock in 2022. 

• Deepening impact on SEL skill development by providing real-time insight into the SEL skills students are practicing and building as the boss—such as social awareness, responsible decision making, relationship building, and empathy. The new holistic reporting dashboard that we launched in 2022 will enable teachers to better support students in developing these skills.

• Increasing career awareness and leadership skills through new types of learning experiences, including Read to Lead: Live! (a youth-facing interview series featuring inspiring leaders) and Read to Lead: Discover (a virtual career day introducing students to an exciting range of professional opportunities). 

• Expansion of Quests, a new curriculum type that offers students an opportunity to apply literacy and SEL skills through a series of project-based career exploration challenges designed to support and extend literacy instruction, SEL skill development, and career exploration. The first Quests, designed with our new Community Pharmacy games, will launch on our platform in spring 2022, and we will also create Quests connected to the careers featured in our other learning series: journalism, nonprofit management, and the medical field. 

(3) Advance our learning model through research and innovation. As we scale our reach, there is nothing more important than ensuring we are doing so with an impact on literacy, life, and career skills. Continuing to invest in our research and innovation initiatives will make it possible to more quickly and effectively design and deliver learning experiences, features, and solutions that meet the needs of educators and middle school youth across the country. 

The overall goal is to increase our impact on the learning experiences of middle school youth so that they are prepared to succeed academically and in 21st Century careers. Specifically, we evaluate the extent to which our programs improve literacy, life, and career skills. We measure impact on literacy skills by time spent reading, number of words read, and student and educator surveys and interviews. We measure improvement of life and career skills by game, survey, and interview data.

Our internal data collection efforts and external evaluations have consistently demonstrated that Read to Lead improves literacy, SEL, and career skills essential to future success. The platform includes an infrastructure for real-time data collection and analysis, capturing robust information on user behavior, time spent reading, in-game decisions, and assessment performance.

In addition to achieving our scale goals, our indicators of successfully achieving impact are:

(1) Engagement in Literacy, SEL, and Career Exploration: In Read to Lead, we will track time spent reading and number of words read, the best predictors of students’ reading skills, as well as the choices students make when faced with decision points designed to the CASEL Core SEL framework of social emotional skills. Openness to career exploration plateaus in 8th grade, so students also must be given earlier insight into future career possibilities and the connection to what they are learning in school today. Our benchmarks are for students participating in to read at least 3,000 words of rigorous nonfiction text (including tier 2 & 3 vocabulary), make at least 7 workplace decisions, and gain exposure to at least 5 careers within our multi-dimensional learning model.

(2) Improvement in Literacy, SEL, and Career Exploration: As measured by student and teacher surveys and interviews, our benchmark is for at least 80% of participating students to improve their literacy skills (reading confidence, motivation, and proficiency), social emotional skills (social awareness, responsible decision making, relationship building, and empathy), and awareness of career opportunities.

Read to Lead learning experiences are grounded in research on literacy, social emotional competencies, culturally responsive curriculum, and game based learning. We design learning experiences with a focus on student agency, and use the motivational aspects of career and leadership to engage students in developing literacy, life, and career skills.

Our Theory of Change is accessible at the link below:

Read to Lead Theory of Change

Read to Lead is a game-based learning platform that invites students to be “the boss” in a virtual workplace and develop their literacy, life, and career skills.

The Read to Lead platform offers teachers and students access to 30 immersive learning games, research-based curriculum, student-led projects, on-demand professional development resources, formative data dashboards that provide teachers real-time insights to guide instruction, and badges and leaderboards that help students understand their progress and stay motivated.

The platform is built on HTML5 to ensure accessibility to anyone with an internet connection. Its modular infrastructure is designed for continuous iteration and improvement, and APIs enable us to integrate with external products such as Google Translate and NeoSpeech.

In June 2020, Read to Lead was selected to partner with the Digital Promise Learner Variability Project. This partnership has led to the design and creation of new evidence-based features and content that deepen the connection between literacy and SEL in the Read to Lead, including student quests (digital student-directed projects) and an SEL dashboard that expands teacher and student ability to track in-game SEL development. In February 2022 we earned Digital Promise’s Research-Based Design Product Certification. We received the certification based on our successful partnership in creating new features such as the holistic reporting dashboard, as well as our overall commitment to research and impact. Digital Promise, a recognized national leader in learning science, has validated that our learning games and tools are designed leveraging the latest evidence and research. As a result, education leaders can feel even more confident knowing that Read to Lead has a tangible impact on student learning outcomes.

As we create the new generation of Read to Lead learning experiences, we are breaking down barriers to equitable access through mobile optimization and increasing our impact on career exploration through the creation of new Read to Lead career worlds in fields such as technology, entrepreneurship, the performing arts, and finance that increase opportunities to integrate literacy, SEL, and career exploration across subject areas and learning environments.

Our DEI strategy is to increase the variety and contribution of experiences that will help us expand our impact in a thoughtful, socially conscious way. Our strategy includes: 

(1) Providing opportunities for employment and advancement at Read to Lead, Inc. for individuals from communities who are historically disadvantaged and underrepresented in edtech. Our specific goal is to increase the percentage of staff and Executive Team members who identify as BIPOC.

(2) Diversifying our Board of Directors. In the current year, we have added three leaders who bring expertise in marketing, growth, and financial strategy from organizations such as Samsung and Oracle NetSuite. All identify as women, two identify as Asian, and one identifies as White. We are specifically prioritizing including an educator and a Latinx voice.

(3) Continuing to create career worlds that feature Black and Latinx characters in leadership positions, and include storylines that more directly address workplace diversity and bias, as well as quests that promote inclusion through student exploration of their own identity to broaden their understanding of “other.”

Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, a professor of children’s literature at Ohio State University, said that “all children need a mirror to see themselves, a window to see the world beyond their own, and a sliding glass door to encourage them out into that world.” These ideas are the central principle guiding our work, especially in a world where only 13% of children’s literature includes multicultural content.

Summary:

Read to Lead is a nonprofit edtech organization with a mission to empower young people in communities experiencing high poverty to develop their literacy and leadership skills. Our goal is to dramatically scale the proven impact of our Read to Lead program. 

Products and services provided:

Read to Lead is our proprietary suite of digital learning games, curricula, assessment tools, and learning experiences. All of Read to Lead’s learning games, curriculum, project-based learning activities, real-time data dashboards, and on-demand professional development resources are freely accessible through our online learning platform. Read to Lead learning games are featured on platforms such as BrainPOP, PBS Learning, and Clever.

Key customers:

Middle school teachers and program administrators who find value in our unique tools for engaging hard-to-reach middle school students. In the words of Holly Crider, a teacher in North Carolina, “The students who do the best with Read to Lead are the ones who have been defeated by school. They have already had eight years of frustration and Read to Lead is one of the few programs that helps motivate these students and make it not only possible, but fun to reach reading goals.” 

Beneficiaries:

Read to Lead immersive learning games are designed to strengthen literacy skills, social-emotional development, and career exploration among participating students in grades 5-9 in low-income communities. Quantitative and qualitative data support the effectiveness of our approach.

Key resources:

Talent (staff and consultants), partner schools and organizations, educators (particularly “super users” / ambassadors), technical assets (Read to Lead learning games, platform, and data), and network of supporters (Board of Directors, donors, volunteers). Our revenue is currently derived from philanthropic donations from individual donors, foundations, and corporations.

Our current revenue model is private philanthropic support from individuals, foundations, and corporations. This model has been critical to reaching the communities, educators, and youth most in need of our resources. This has been particularly true during the pandemic when we have prioritized free access to our program and professional development. Since the pandemic began, we have received new or increased support from AT&T (including as part of the 2021 Aspire Accelerator cohort), Digital Promise, the Booth Ferris Foundation, the Moriah Fund, Goldman Sachs, the Hearst Foundations, BlackRock, the Max and Lorayne Cooper Foundation, and the S & L Marx Foundation. 

Looking forward, our goal is to continue to develop new sources of philanthropic revenue and pilot two earned revenue strategies - professional development provided on a fee for service basis and earned income from learning game creation partnerships - to provide additional resources and help us grow sustainably. 

1. Read to Lead participated in the 2021 AT&T Aspire Accelerator as part of a cohort of 8 leading edtech organizations. As a result of the investments in product innovation and educator support that the New York Life Foundation’s grants and partnership made possible, Read to Lead was selected for the Accelerator from a competitive field of more than 200 applicants. The six-month Accelerator included a grant of $125,000 and strengthened our ability to create impactful curriculum and tools with a focus on scalability and sustainability. At the culminating event of the Accelerator in December 2021, Read to Lead won the ‘Pitches with Purpose’ event among the program cohort, and received an additional grant of $50,000. In February 2022, we were invited to share a proposal for $100,000 in additional general operating support funding.

1. We partnered with the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy in 2021 to create compelling and realistic scenarios where students are in charge of leading a community pharmacy, such as  providing advice to a patient struggling with the decision to receive a vaccine. After a successful pilot of the learning games with 90 students in November 2021—where 85% of students surveyed shared that the games were fun, engaging, and easy to use—the new series launched in February 2022 to our national community of educators and youth. In addition to providing timely content for Read to Lead teachers and students, the partnership included earned revenue from the University of Pittsburgh and provided a model for new game development across more career environments. The first example is a series of four new learning games set in financial services that we are creating with BlackRock in 2022, with a scheduled launch in the fall.