Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. They are seeking a Learning Experience Designer to lead the design and production of instructional materials for their core secondary ELA curriculum, ensuring quality and alignment with educational standards.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the grade-level lead and subject-matter point of contact for your assigned grade, owning the resolution of content and alignment issues across workstreams and being the person internal teams and external contributors count on for timely, well-reasoned answers
- Take accountability for ensuring that lessons, texts, and assessments at your grade level form a coherent arc—consistent in structure, voice, rigor, and fidelity to the curriculum model from the first unit to the last
- Hold final grade-level responsibility for verifying that all materials align to the relevant state ELA standards and frameworks, maintaining grade-level rigor while ensuring accessibility for diverse learners
- Support the development of grade-level scopes and sequences, ensuring the progression of texts, skills, and standards builds knowledge coherently across units and reflects established instructional frameworks
- Support the development of teacher-facing and student-facing lessons and other materials that model rigorous, scaffolded, standards-aligned instruction based on established instructional frameworks and product specifications, upholding the Newsela instructional framework
- Draft and refine formative and summative assessment items, rubrics, and performance tasks that accurately measure student mastery of grade-level standards and follow assessment best practices
- Build embedded scaffolds and differentiation—graphic organizers, sentence frames, leveled vocabulary supports—so complex, high-interest content is accessible to all learners, including multilingual learners and striving readers, without diluting rigor
- Own the review of contributor- and AI-generated lessons, activities, and assessments at your grade, providing focused editorial and pedagogical feedback grounded in Newsela guidelines to ensure accuracy, engagement, and fidelity to the curriculum model
- Support the iterative refinement of AI prompts and specifications that power stages of lesson design and production, helping translate instructional blueprints into consistent, high-quality content at scale
- Collaborate in developing, refining, and implementing the rubrics, checklists, and conventions that guide contributors and AI tools, proposing improvements based on what you see at your grade level
- Collaborate closely with senior designers, lesson and assessment writers, ELD specialists, and product and technology teams to integrate feedback, align across grade levels, and support content digitization and platform experience
- Prioritize and re-prioritize in line with business needs, delivering work on time and to Newsela’s standards of quality, and communicating progress and blockers proactively
Skills
- Bachelor's degree in English, Education, Curriculum & Instruction, or a related field
- 5+ years of experience in secondary ELA curriculum development, instructional design, or content creation, preferably for an educational technology or publishing company (school- or district-based curriculum development experience also considered). A high school emphasis is welcome given near-term needs
- Strong working knowledge of secondary ELA pedagogy and state standards and frameworks such as CCSS, including reading development, writing instruction, and assessment best practices
- Excellent English writing and editing, with a demonstrated ability to produce polished, standards-aligned instructional content and to give clear, useful feedback to other writers
- A judicious eye for quality and acute attention to detail when reviewing materials, with the ability to make sound, well-reasoned content decisions independently
- A strong ownership mindset—you take responsibility for outcomes at your grade level, follow through on commitments, surface risks early, and hold yourself and others to a high bar
- Comfort and fluency with AI tools, and an interest in using them to accelerate high-quality content development without sacrificing pedagogical rigor
- Strong organizational and verbal communication skills, with the ability to manage multiple workstreams and prioritize in conjunction with business needs
- Prior classroom teaching experience in secondary ELA
- Experience contributing to a core (basal) ELA curriculum at a curriculum provider
- Experience creating resources or scaffolds for multilingual learners and striving readers
- Experience reviewing or guiding the work of contributors, freelancers, or vendor teams
- Experience with digital content authoring tools or content management systems (CMS)
- Master's degree in English, Education, Curriculum & Instruction, or a related field
Benefits
- Comprehensive medical benefits with employer contribution to premiums and to HSA accounts.
- Additional benefits such as gym reimbursement, pet insurance, free access to the Calm app, Rocket Lawyer and more to help you stay healthy: mind, body, and soul.
- We are a fully remote company.
- We provide a monthly tech stipend to support your WFH needs!
- Inclusive benefits to support you and your family, including parental leave, fertility support, adoption, and more!
- Invest in your future with our 401(k) plan, which includes a employer match to help you build long-term financial security.
- Flexible PTO, paid sick time off, company holidays plus winter break (Dec 24th - Jan 1st).
- Newsela offers an annual learning and development allowance to employees to attend external training sessions, classes, workshops, conferences, and educational materials to foster professional growth within their current role and career aspirations at Newsela.
- All offers of employment are contingent upon the successful completion of a background check as part of our pre-employment process.
Company Overview