Partner, Learning Products & Programs

The Learning Accelerator (TLA) is a national nonprofit building an education field where everyone learns faster and changes systems together to ensure every child reaches their unique potential. TLA helps practitioners, leaders, technologists, and policy-makers learn faster from success and innovation and apply that knowledge to improve how we are educating students. We research and investigate; we document and publish; we connect, collaborate, and build coalitions. We help school systems improve and offer expertise in areas including emerging technologies, school models, and systems of support. What we are, most of all, is visionaries, not for incremental change, but for a revolutionary shift in how students are educated.

Position Overview

The Learning Products & Programs (LPP) team plays a pivotal role in supporting TLA’s mission to accelerate field learning and “on-the-ground” advancement of the practices and tools that create more personalized, mastery-based, and whole-child approaches in K-12 education. The team works with school, system, and support sector practitioners across the educational field to capture, generate, disseminate, and increase adoption of research- and action-informed innovations. 

As Partner, you will work under the leadership of TLA’s Managing Director, LPP, in close collaboration with TLA’s broader Programs team – including other LPP team members as well as TLA’s Research, Measurement, & Policy (RMP) team – as well as a variety of external organizations. You will learn from and with education teams and support providers working to advance learner-centered approaches in schools and systems by: 

• Working alongside educators and those who support them to make sense of challenges, emerging approaches, and opportunities; 
• Building and sustaining networks for purposeful learning and collective action; 
• Capturing and codifying knowledge emerging from projects and broader field initiatives in highly actionable ways that support transfer to field practice; and,
• Actively disseminating knowledge through open and accessible resources, tools, platforms, and partnerships. 

As an integral member of the team, you will have a focus on TLA’s “learning with” programs and projects, including supporting our networked learning initiatives and leading specific learning services projects with partners (including but not limited to market analysis and field mapping, tool development, knowledge capture, etc.). You will also contribute to a variety of broader LPP projects and objectives, including content development for TLA’s practitioner learning products and contributing to TLA’s sector-level thought leadership efforts. 

Key Responsibilities

Lead a defined portfolio of networked learning and field research projects aligned to TLA’s strategic priorities (25%)

• Lead timely, relevant, and proximate networks and field research, aligned to TLA’s articulated field acceleration priorities, to understand and take action against emerging and enduring problems of equitable practice at the student and adult levels. 
  • In the short term, this will include supporting TLA’s Exponential Learning Initiative, with an explicit focus on shepherding a network of field implementation partners, overseeing individual network management processes, leading network and individual collaboration and check-in sessions, proactively identifying, making sense of, and actionably capturing and communicating emerging lessons and knowledge, and designing and executing a cross-network convening in April 2024.
• With MD, LPP, and other leaders across the organization, set annual goals for your team’s portfolio of projects and work, and articulate achievable objectives and key results to achieve them.
• Manage your portfolio project and program resources – budgets, people, time, and external resources – effectively and efficiently, setting a high bar for quality and ensuring important details, tasks, or follow-ups do not fall through the cracks.
• Develop a clear plan to collaboratively execute programs and projects, including the articulation of execution timelines, progress milestones, and performance indicators.
• Identify new partnerships and opportunities to accelerate sector improvement strategically aligned with your portfolio and in coordination with other RMP and LPP efforts.
• Support grant and proposal writing as well as proactively build partnerships that offer new opportunities for services and collaboration emerging from work.

Lead discrete LPP projects to increase external partners’ capacity (25%)

• Manage specific LPP projects aligned to goals and TLA’s learning service expertise, including but not limited to project conception, field research and design, dissemination planning, product development, and project and relationship management.
• Leading/facilitating networks, research and policy practice partnerships, or other practitioner collaboratives focused on research, measurement, evaluation, and/or policy
• Deliver the highest level of service to TLA’s LPP partners.

Produce resources, tools, reports, and relationships to drive greater knowledge and application of evidence to help the sector learn (20%)

• Act as a content expert to understand, improve, iterate, and expand upon TLA’s existing guidance, tools, and frameworks.
• Produce compelling openly licensed resources in the form of new tools, guides, papers, or presentations, in collaboration with LPP Product leaders.
• Exhibit a learning orientation, adapting tools and resources as needed in response to insights from educators, other experts, field partners, and user data.

Collaborate with other LPP and RMP team members to support projects and make connections to advance strategic aims (20%)

• Proactively collaborate with team members to consistently and meaningfully create connections between and across LPP projects.
• Support the translation of learning emerging from RMP projects and programs, ensuring it is effectively translated to guidance for on-the-ground practitioners and decision-makers.
• Where needed, flexibly contribute capacity to other projects.

Contribute to TLA’s work as a trusted thought leader at the national level (10%)

• Proactively build a deep knowledge of related K-12 sector initiatives and leaders, developing field relationships and acting as a trusted partner to others.
• Leverage relationships and LPP expertise to engage in thought leadership activities and share learnings with the field. 
• Widely disseminate findings and learnings through blogs, reports, conference presentations, webinars, podcasts, and participation on panels or in working groups with partner organizations.

Requirements

• Experience & Qualifications 
  • 8+ years of work experience in K-12 education, social enterprise, consulting, and/or a related field
  • Strong understanding of K-12 teaching and learning, either through direct experience in schools or classrooms or as a support provider to these environments
  • Demonstrated comfort and skill working in virtual environments with remote team members and partners
• Commitment to TLA’s mission and values. You are personally excited about TLA’s work. You thrive in an environment that values impact, collective intelligence and action, joyful authenticity, humble persistence, nimbleness and entrepreneurialism, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and – above all – putting kids first.
• Exceptional communication. You are skilled at communicating complex ideas in actionable, understandable, and compelling ways to practitioners. Through a variety of formats – print, multimedia, and learning events – you can create learning experiences that help adults take action to improve learning for students. You are comfortable writing for a variety of audiences as well as working iteratively with editorial support to share timely insights and ideas with the broader K-12 field.
• Thoughtful relationship builder that builds partnerships to advance collective objectives. You believe that impact requires working with others towards shared goals, have a consultative mindset that strengthens others, and bring success working with and through people and organizations. 
• Self-direction and adept project management: You can wrangle complex programs, often with competing priorities, into actionable goals, milestones, and deliverables with timelines. You are self-directed and independent yet confident to actively seek out support and collaboration as needed. You are comfortable and excited to operate at both the 10,000- and 10-foot levels. You thrive working in an environment with both exceedingly high expectations as well as exceptional support, leading projects from initial conception through design to close-out, managing your resources and collaborators well. Throughout projects, you deal appropriately with ambiguity, communicate proactively and transparently, and work flexibly with other project members and broader teams to deliver on time and on budget.
• Resourceful and willing team contribution: You roll up your sleeves in a highly entrepreneurial environment, enjoying working on a small-but-mighty team that pulls beyond its weight. You are comfortable working remotely and can prioritize conflicting needs, handle multiple work streams expeditiously, thoroughly, and on deadline, following projects through to successful completion.
• Commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. You are self-reflective about your own growth and learning, relative privilege, identity, and power. You believe that diversity makes us better and that inclusivity is an active and intentional pursuit. You model these beliefs in your actions and words.