Director, Instructional Content

Job Description

The Director, Instructional Content will lead a growing team of subject area managers, instructional designers, content producers, and assessment developers who create all the instructional content that accompanies Newsela articles. This content includes quizzes, writing prompts, vocabulary activities, mini-lessons, aligned curriculum companions and other resources. Reporting to the Chief Content Officer, you will set the vision and strategy for instructional design, and will ensure the content fits instructional best practices, business strategy, and production feasibility. You will also work closely with our Product, Editorial, and Data teams to improve our instructional content to drive buyer and user satisfaction across our different subject products (ELA, Science, and Social Studies).

Why You’ll Love This Role

You will have the opportunity and resources to make authentic content more powerful than ever for educators through the development of learning scaffolds, assessments, instructional supports and thoughtful curation. You will guide, mentor, and expand a team of high-achieving managers who are passionate about raising the bar for educational content in K-12 classrooms. You will be a trusted thought partner to the Editorial Director who will rely on you to inform the way Newsela content should be instructionalized according to subject area. You’ll set quarterly goals for the instructional team in sync with company priorities and help steer improvements in their work which will drive better engagement across different subject areas.

Why We’ll Love You

You have 10+ years of relevant experience including work in some or all of the following, ideally in more than one subject areas: educational publishing, instructional design, standards alignment, personalized learning, literacy development, curriculum mapping, assessment design and production. You’ve done the hard work of unpacking and interpreting learning standards. You’ve worked under deadline to produce polished, published instructional content that reaches broad K12 audiences. Additionally, you have people management experience with a proven record of developing high-performing direct reports and have also been responsible for contracting vendors, consultants and subject matter experts.

About Newsela

Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that combines engaging, leveled content with integrated formative assessments and insights to supercharge engagement and learning in every subject. Students and teachers use Newsela to find digital content from 100+ of the best sources—from National Geographic to NASA, Biography.com to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Washington Post to the Wichita Eagle. Content is instructionalized to meet students where they are, with interactive tools and analytics to take them where they want to go. Newsela has become an essential solution for schools and districts, with a presence in over 90% of U.S. K-12 schools. Newsela is the content platform for the connected classroom.