Paloma
Paloma is a family engagement tool that equips parents to serve as at-home tutors, delivering short, daily reading and math activities aligned to their school's curriculum. Parents lead 15-minute sessions at home using an "I do, we do, you do" structure on a mobile web app. Paloma uses AI to translate parent-facing guidance into families' home languages and to generate decodable books and math problems that feature the student as the protagonist.
What it looks like in action
What the students do:
Students work one-on-one with a parent or caregiver at home to complete a 15-minute daily tutoring session in reading or math. The session opens with the parent introducing a specific skill (e.g., a phonological awareness pattern, a sound-spelling correspondence, a math concept), then moves into guided practice where parent and student practice the skill together. The session ends with the student applying the skill independently—reading aloud a decodable story or working through a math story problem with parent coaching. Each day, the parent receives a text message with a link to the day's session. They watch a short introductory video on the skill, practice the skill together with their child using the AI-generated content, and coach their child as they apply it. Because the "I do, we do, you do" structure scaffolds the parent through the lesson, parents don't need to know the content in advance.
What the AI does:
The AI generates each student's daily session, mapping it to the specific skills their teacher has flagged and aligned to their curriculum. It creates interest-aligned decodable stories and math story problems about topics of the family's choosing, featuring the student as the protagonist, and builds guidance that helps the caregiver scaffold the lesson, such as audio that models a word being segmented and blended. It translates all parent-facing guidance into the family's home language. By design, the AI's outputs go to the caregiver, not the child: students never interact with the AI directly, which keeps the learning grounded in the parent-child relationship. Sessions are delivered through a daily text-message link.
What the teacher does:
Teachers introduce the tool to families. From there, they can personalize a student's learning path within the scope and sequence—but the primary interaction is between parent and child.
What the leaders do:
A school, school system, or CMO leader adopts Paloma as a universal Tier 1 resource and integrates it into the system’s family engagement strategy. Because Paloma reaches families directly via text message, implementation does not require teacher-by-teacher or classroom-by-classroom rollout.
Reach
29,559
Students
1,484
Teachers
171
Schools
55+
School systems
(Title 1 Districts)
Use
Recommended use
Fifteen minutes daily, parent-led at home, supplementing classroom instruction
Actual use
On average, families who are active on Paloma any given week complete 3.9 tutoring sessions with their children.
This strong behavioral habituation is reflected in a 65% DAU/MAU (Daily Active Users to Monthly Active Users) ratio.
Product dimensions
Subject
Literacy
Grade span
K–2
Curriculum alignment
Curriculum-connected: Paloma matches to school system-adopted phonics and math curricula, including Wonders, CKLA, Fundations, EL Education, Illustrative Math, and Eureka but doesn’t contain the curriculum’s content.
Design scope
Specific instructional job
The way AI interacts with students
- AI does not interact with students.
- AI gives feedback directly to students.
Teacher guidance
Offers a range of uses (no specific teacher nudges)
Social vs. solo use
Parent-paired
Teacher override
No score to override (AI doesn't assign a score)
Product adoption
System partnership (districts or organizations buy and deploy across classrooms)
Dashboard scope
Teacher dashboard available
Dosage recommendations
Provides dosage recommendations
Users' take on wins and limitations
There are clear trends in what users (i.e., teachers, students, instructional leaders) see as the wins and limitations of each product. For each trend below, we've included one illustrative quote from our user interviews.
Wins
Paloma removes adoption friction—it texts users a link. There's no app, no password, and nothing to download. Teachers have named this as the reason family participation is higher than their experience with other tools.
"One thing that I really like about Paloma is that it's not an app. There's no passwords, it is just an encrypted link that is texted to families daily that then sends them to a web browser where they do the lesson. And so I think that's honestly why we have so much participation—we have 75% participation across the grade right now—because parents don't have to download anything, they don't have to try to log into anything, kids aren't having to remember their school passwords. It is just a texted link."
— Teacher, 2nd Grade Phonics, Science, and Social Studies
Paloma equips parents to teach skills they couldn't otherwise teach—a 45-second skill-instruction video in the family's home language plus the "I do, we do, you do" structure means parents learn how to teach the skill (e.g., r-controlled vowels, phonemes) before practicing with their child; this fills a real gap, especially for parents who are strong readers but not trained in phonics instruction.
“We try to partner with them as much as we can with the curriculum that we're using in the classroom. But nothing that we've used up to this point has been so accessible for partnership and presenting tutoring to parents. Paloma is a very accessible platform and it presents educational materials in a digestible way for parents.”
— Teacher, 2nd Grade Phonics, Science, and Social Studies
Paloma provides practice on foundational skills that classroom time can't always provide—classrooms run grade-level content; Paloma addresses the skills individual students actually need, especially for multilingual learners and students with foundational gaps.
"In kindergarten, students who were flagged at the beginning of the year for being at risk for dyslexia used Paloma and were much less likely to be flagged in the winter again. Students who used Paloma consistently with their families were much more likely by the middle of the year to have moved into that oral reading fluency phase."
— Head of Curriculum & Instruction
Limitations
The teacher interface displays whether a student finished the lesson but not whether they mastered the skill; teachers named this as the most-wanted product addition (a weekly check, quiz, or formative data point).
"One thing that I would like to see [is] quantifiable data. There’s no sort of data collection. It’s just did the students do it or did they not? I can't see how successful [students] are with a specific skill.”
— Teacher, 2nd Grade Phonics, Science, & Social Studies
Because Paloma runs at home, whether a student gets the daily practice comes down to a family finding the time and choosing to do it, which is something outside a teacher's control.
"It's hard to see consistent engagement because I have my group of families who show up to everything… and then I have families that are a little more absent. We have 50% participation across the grade right now….we have families who I've never met, I've never heard from them, and they're doing it every single day of the week, and then I have families who are here all the time who are also doing it. So it's a mix.”
—Teacher, 2nd Grade Phonics, Science, & Social Studies
The system relies on parents to catch and correct reading errors—Paloma doesn't flag mispronunciations, non-decodable words, or tricky sight words in the moment.
"On what Paloma does when a student reads a word incorrectly: “I don't believe there's any feedback. I believe…it's 'read it' and then click the next button, 'read it,' click the next button. I don't know that there's any [feedback]....There's no feedback in terms of, like, skill progression at all.”
— Teacher, 2nd Grade Phonics, Science, & Social Studies
Our instructional take
Instructional wins
- If parents use it consistently, Paloma adds more time on task for foundational skill practice.
- Treating parents and caregivers as partners in supporting reading instruction creates opportunities—giving them better visibility into their children’s progress and supporting a stronger alliance between parents and teachers in supporting student learning.
Instructional limitations
- The alignment to curricula is still emerging (some are stronger than others), which can make the learning experience with parents disconnected from what students are learning in school.
- Though Paloma reports impressive usage rates, the value entirely hinges on getting parents to use it consistently, which is hard for any product to do.
- Though Paloma provides guidance for parents, the range of ways parents use it with children (e.g., how many errors they catch, how they intervene) is broad, which will likely lead to a range of impact.
Implementation considerations
- Unlike school-based products, leaders do not have to think about scheduling or pacing. They do still have to think about teacher and leader training.
- Paloma requires maintaining up-to-date contact information for families.
- Leaders need to think through how they help teachers monitor and promote Paloma onboarding and usage.
- Leaders need to think about how teachers use the usage data to support ongoing dialogue with families and the role that Paloma usage data might play in parent-teacher conferences and family outreach.
Evidence of Impact
Available evidence
Study underway
There is no independent, causal evidence of impact on student learning yet. A study is underway through Accelerate’s Call for Effective Technology program, run via the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s research process.
Source: Joan Ganz Cooney Center (May 2026); Accelerate Call for Effective Technology · AI in Action Evidence Scan (May 2026)
From the developer
From
Paloma
The following was written by the team at Paloma and has been edited for clarity and tone by Instruction Partners.
For SY 2026–27, we have launched the following updates:
- Scaffolding and enhanced support for multilingual learners to allow families to hear words segmented and blended in real time, helping parents ensure accurate pronunciation and differentiate instruction for their children to maximize productive struggle.
- Content to support more grade levels and more curricula
- Comprehensive skill mastery tracking dashboards that equip teachers, school leaders, and families with real-time visibility into specific phonetic milestones and persistent misconceptions to inform lesson pacing.
- Direct-to-parent pathway that enables families to access the product independently, regardless of whether their child’s school system is partnered with Paloma.
- A coach mode that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to give parents more dynamic guidance as they interact with their children during lessons.
Product website: https://www.palomalearning.com/
Hear from the developer
Instruction Partners' CEO Emily Freitag spoke with Alejandro Gibes de Gac from Paloma to understand what problems they're trying to solve, how the tool works, and what they're still figuring out.