Greater Boston is home to a set of charter schools that are among the most successful in the country in improving student academic skills as measured by state tests. These schools are committed to boosting student outcomes and continuously improving through innovation. Greater Boston is also home to research universities that are exploring how students' cognitive and noncognitive skills contribute to their success in school and later in life, how best to measure those skills, and what school-based interventions are effective in building them. The Boston Charter Research Collaborative (BCRC) is a multi-year partnership among these high-performing charter networks, researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Transforming Education (TransformEd) that seeks to conduct rigorous in-school research on measures and interventions that target growth in cognitive and non-cognitive skills over time. Together, researchers and practitioners within the BCRC are working over an initial three-year period to serve as: (1) a source of gold-standard evidence on scalable practices to improve student outcomes within and beyond school; and (2) a model for similar partnerships between practitioners and researchers that efficiently address the education sector's most pressing evidentiary needs. This paper is the first in a series that will share lessons learned from collaborative activities. It focuses on the BCRC's first year and provide recommendations for laying a foundation for a successful collaboration between researchers and practitioners who want to work closely with each other to better understand and support growth and success for all students.