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Why You'll Love This Role: 

We are seeking a Learning Experience Designer (LXD), Core to serve as a grade-level lead in the design and production of high-quality instructional materials for Newsela's core secondary ELA curriculum. This role is ideal for a hands-on curriculum builder with strong ELA content and pedagogy expertise who is passionate about creating engaging, standards-aligned lessons, texts, and assessments-and who is energized by owning the quality and coherence of an entire grade level of instruction.

As a grade-level lead, you are accountable for the quality of everything that ships at your grade: the development of scopes and sequences for units; development and review of teacher- and student-facing materials; content from internal teams, external contributors, and AI-supported workflows; and making the day-to-day judgment calls that keep units aligned to standards, the curriculum model, and Newsela's quality bar. You'll collaborate with other content teams and leaders in developing, refining, and implementing program-level frameworks and quality guidelines, and you'll own their consistent application at your grade.

If you love the craft of curriculum-shaping it, improving it, and helping others make it better-this role is an opportunity to put your fingerprints on every lesson students at your grade level experience.

What You'll Be Doing:

Grade-Level Ownership

• Grade-Level Leadership: 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.
• Coherence & Consistency: 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.
• Standards Alignment: 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.

Curriculum Design & Content Creation

• Scope & Sequence Development: 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.
• Lesson Development: 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.
• Assessment Development: 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.
• Scaffolding & Access: 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.

Review & Quality Assurance at Scale

• Human Review at Scale: 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.
• AI-Supported Production: 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.
• Quality Documentation: 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.

Collaboration & Workflow

• Cross-Team Partnership: 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.
• Organization & Delivery: 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.

About You:

• Education: Bachelor's degree in English, Education, Curriculum & Instruction, or a related field.
• Experience: 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.
• ELA Expertise: Strong working knowledge of secondary ELA pedagogy and state standards and frameworks such as CCSS, including reading development, writing instruction, and assessment best practices.
• Content Skills: 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.
• Judgment & Detail: A judicious eye for quality and acute attention to detail when reviewing materials, with the ability to make sound, well-reasoned content decisions independently.
• Accountability: 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.
• AI Fluency: Comfort and fluency with AI tools, and an interest in using them to accelerate high-quality content development without sacrificing pedagogical rigor.
• Ways of Working: 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.

All offers of employment are contingent upon the successful completion of a background check as part of our pre-employment process.

Why you'll love working at Newsela:

• Health & Wellness: 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. 
• Work From Home: We are a fully remote company. We provide a monthly tech stipend to support your WFH needs!
• Supporting ALL Families: Inclusive benefits to support you and your family, including parental leave, fertility support, adoption, and more! 
• Financial Wellbeing: Invest in your future with our 401(k) plan, which includes a employer match to help you build long-term financial security.
• Time Off: Flexible PTO, paid sick time off, company holidays plus winter break (Dec 24th - Jan 1st).
• Professional Development: 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.
• Make A Difference: No matter your role or department, the work you do each day helps share the future of education and improves the lives of students and teachers.

Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K-12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela's solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner.

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