The Role:
The Director of Learning Design will lead the development of frameworks for instructional design across Newsela, and lead the curation of externally authored curriculum. You will develop universal tools to be applied across all curriculum (e.g. differentiation, English Language Development) towards a comprehensive set of tools for teaching and learning. You will also lead the charge in developing guidelines for instructional resources, including guidelines for the curation of externally authored curriculum and specs for all instructional resources. Additionally, you will help design and build a modular content strategy, including a schema for organization of modular content. You will create and lead a methodology for leveraging existing capabilities (where possible) to meet the needs of all learners, including students with identified needs, emergent bilingual, and gifted and talented students. You’ll also collaborate across the Product and Learning teams to build a shared vision, understanding of the user needs, pedagogical grounding and cross-product implications for instructional/programmatic overlays.
Why You’ll Love This Role:
As a member of our Product team, you will drive learning design across a set of resources that will help build the future of education, enhance how districts and teachers engage students, and develop approaches that allow educators and learners to engage seamlessly across products within Newsela. More specifically, this role will allow you to contribute to how Newsela is reshaping content products for districts, schools, and teachers nationwide. You will get to play a crucial role in the evolution of learning materials, helping to make our content more accessible and meaningful to students. You’ll have the opportunity to help us fine-tune our content production process as we scale, and will lead collaboration across teams to build a shared vision and methods for learning design in a quickly growing organization.
Why We’ll Love You:
You have 2+ years experience developing teaching and learning resources for wide distribution, and 2+ years leading and developing a highly collaborative team. You’ve demonstrated success executing on innovative learning design at significant scale, and know the C3 Framework for Social Studies inside and out, with significant experience leading design and use of aligned materials. You can clearly articulate the range of needs presented by a national user group, and can direct curriculum development with that spectrum of needs in mind. Ideally, you have experience designing professional development or training for curriculum design. You’re excited to use data to build a vision for the possibilities for high quality instructional materials and best-in-class learning design to positively impact teachers and students nationwide. You also have formal training in pedagogy or learning design; Masters Degree required, PhD preferred.
About Newsela:
One of the fastest growing tech companies in K-12 education, Newsela was founded on the principle that while every child may have unique learning preferences, they all deserve a rich learning experience that ignites a love of learning. We built our platform based on learning science research to deliver the most engaging, authentic content to modernize how teaching happens in the classroom. Along with interactive assessments and tools, we provide teachers with digital content at five reading levels -- from +100 of the best sources -- that is relevant to the diverse backgrounds and interests of their students. Since we started in 2013, we’ve established a presence in 90% of U.S. K-12 schools and over 2.5M teachers and 37M students have registered with Newsela.
