Director of Foundational Literacy

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Take full ownership of the 0-to-1 instructional design for Inkwell’s foundational literacy strand targeting K–5.

• Establish a robust research foundation, instructional principles, design rationale, and a cohesive vision for foundational reading and writing skills.

• Create and uphold the scope and sequence along with curriculum design specifications.

• Define the architecture of lessons, instructional routines, assessment methodologies, and criteria for instructional quality.

• Design supplementary practice, opportunities for re-teaching, acceleration pathways, differentiated applications, and small-group instructional paths.

• Provide support for multilingual learners and students facing reading challenges while upholding high literacy expectations.

• Lead the development, prototyping, review, and enhancement of lessons, routines, student materials, assessments, decodable texts, and teacher guidance.

• Conduct detailed curriculum-design tasks personally and oversee others in alignment with the broader instructional model.

• Implement review processes while offering academic direction, feedback, and coaching to curriculum developers, writers, and editors.

• Collaborate effectively with teams in curriculum, editorial, assessment, product development, UX/design, production, and professional learning.

• Utilize assessment and field-testing data to assess and improve curriculum decisions.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven experience in designing or significantly shaping a multi-grade, systematic foundational literacy curriculum or an equivalently complex literacy program.

• Significant ownership of instructional architecture applied across various teachers and classrooms.

• Extensive knowledge in early literacy development and the science of reading.

• Capability to critically analyze research and translate findings into tangible curriculum-design choices.

• Experience in developing scope and sequence, curriculum architecture, instructional routines, lesson models, design specifications, and quality criteria for programs.

• Ability to lead intricate curriculum development from concept to execution.

• Experience in balancing instructional integrity with development constraints, usability, and timelines.

• Expertise in reviewing materials and providing actionable feedback on instructional quality, developmental appropriateness, sequencing, clarity, and coherence.

• Strong comprehension of assessment within early literacy contexts.

• Knowledge of foundational literacy instruction for multilingual learners and students with reading difficulties.

• Ability to articulate complex pedagogical concepts into clear written specifications and guidance.

• Strong collaboration and project management abilities.

• Familiarity with research databases, literacy frameworks, standards, curriculum evaluation tools, Google Suite, Airtable, curriculum mapping, and scope-and-sequence tools, along with AI content generation and editing platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude.

• Must be based in the U.S.

🏝️ Benefits

• Employee-covered health care.

• Retirement matching.

• Flexible paid time off.

• 12+ observed days off.

• Biannual company retreats.

• Optional local meetups.

• Flexibility to work remotely from home.

• Technology package provided.

• Home office stipend.

• Opportunities for education and professional development.

• Monthly Brunch and Learns.