This Director, Leadership Coach position will begin with spring training, which starts in March and ends in early June. Spring training will ground the Leadership Coach in their role and responsibilities for 2019 summer institute, which trains and prepares first year corps members for the classroom. Between March and June, this role will be part time, paid on an hourly basis, and non-benefits eligible. At the start of institute in early June, the Leadership Coach will transition into their full time, benefits eligible role with the Memphis staff and will remain on staff beyond institute.
Leadership Coaches will directly support first-year corps members starting at onboarding and continuing through institute and year one, accelerating their collective impact and ensuring their students meet an ambitious academic goal with a primary (though not exclusive) focus on growing pedagogical skill through the lens of culturally responsive pedagogy. Each Leadership Coach supports a cohort of 20-25 current first-year teachers during institute and year one, and enrolls a cohort of 20-25 incoming corps members during matriculation and onboarding.
Leadership Coaches are responsible for creating and contributing to a culture within their learning circles that is uplifting, energy-giving, sustaining, challenging, rigorous, loving, communal and student achievement-oriented, and that encourages every member to be their best and take on publicly growing pedagogical skills to bring about change for students. This culture is so robust that it is life-changing for its members.
Areas of Responsibility:
- Coach their corps members to establish and achieve an ambitious academic goal alongside their students that ensures that students experience, at a minimum, a year and a half worth of growth in one academic year.
- Coach their corps to strengthen and grow their cultural competence and understanding of their cultural identity and its impact on the world. They will provide supportive environments while motivating corps members to engage fully in difficult conversations. Coaches will guide conversations and activities to allow corps members to not only gain a deeper understanding of themselves but also the people and communities they support.
- Coach their corps members to grow their capacity as leaders in the movement for educational equity for the long-term by honing their reflective practices, aiding them in making sense of the system and its impact on them and their students, as well as encouraging and supporting their corps members to take bold, aligned actions to lead students to achieve an ambitious academic goal.
- Retain, at a minimum, 95 percent of their first-years through the first year, and ensure that corps members leave the first year of their commitment on fire for what they want to accomplish as individuals and as a collective in year two.
Coach and Empower Your Corps Members (65%)
- Be the fiercest and best advocate, champion and coach to your teachers. You will root your actions in what helps them achieve their ambitious academic outcomes for students while also broadening their perspective as to what it takes to achieve educational equity.
- Observe their teaching, collaborate with their school administration and coaches, provide feedback and support your corps members to set next steps in their work at institute and during year one.
- Facilitate learning circles in groups that further learning and growth against both your teachers’ goals and our strategic bets.
- Foster a learning environment in your cohort that is inclusive, encourages group learning and accountability, and drives stronger student and teacher outcomes.
- Report and analyze data to ensure your teachers are making progress necessary to achieve their visions and our collective goals.
- Support your corps members in making meaning of their institute and corps experience, their skills and passions and what that means for how they want to contribute over the long-term in the movement for educational equity.
Onboard and Support Incoming Corps Members (15%)
- Create an experience for incoming corps members that moves our teachers from imagining themselves here to profoundly believing in their potential impact, the strength of the TFA community, and our approach to leadership development.
- Ensure that knowledge and experience of our Learning Theory, mission and vision translate from onboarding through the transition to Institute.
- Build a mindset of flexibility about placement, as we bring in leaders ready to serve students in whatever capacity is most needed. You will also use the Praxis testing process as a chance to explicitly model and practice our learning theory.
- Begin building relationships with your cohort of incoming corps members in a mutually honest, vulnerable, and authentic way. Through organic conversation and consideration of generational diversity, relationships will build virtually, and lead to the feeling that they have a team of people and a coach who can empathize, support, challenge, and help them transition into Institute.
Collaborate to Refine Our Knowledge and Practice (15%)
- Come together with your peer Leadership Coaches and the SMD, TLD to share what you're trying with your cohort, what you're learning, what you're struggling with, and what you're thinking about for the future in your cohort's support, particularly as it relates to the theory we have around collective accountability and leadership.
- Collaborate with the TLD team to use what you’re learning in leading your cohort towards our outcomes to inform the continual evolution of our program.
Engage in Regional Priorities and Activities (5%)
- Feel on the hook for and support our broader regional efforts towards our vision.
- Engage in and lead ongoing professional development with our team.
Educational Background:
Hold, at the minimum, a bachelor’s degree
Skills/Experience:
- Have 5+ years of work experience, at least one of which includes successfully managing others to achieve ambitious results laterally or directly including qualitatively and quantitatively
- Have experience successfully coaching adults, preferably in ways that rely on the group to learn from one another
- Be able to travel up to three times a year
- Prior corps member experience preferred, but not required
- Willing to work occasional weekends or evening work hours required
To be successful as a Leadership Coach, you must be:
- Passionate and possess an undeniable love for coaching and supporting corps members. You want your corps members to not only be successful teachers but, more importantly, great people. You love your corps members, see their full potential (even when they doubt it) and look at your job as doing whatever it takes to help them achieve their visions for their kids and themselves. You can have critical and direct conversations that drive towards outcomes, strengthen relationships and broaden perspectives. You understand and define your success by how successful your corps members feel they are.
- A conscious leader. You orient towards social justice and equity. You have a pattern of modeling a set of values for others through self-reflection, curiosity and exploration, and an ability to connect and empathize with people. You have a history of operating in the spirit of our commitment to diversity and a keen understanding of the dynamics of race and class in America. You lead and believe others must lead, through a culturally responsive lens and in a way that empowers staff, corps members, and alumni.
- A learner and iterator. You are hungry to learn and regularly seek out opportunities for feedback and growth. You see feedback as a path to strengthening your work, actively seek it out, and respond positively to it. You are open and collaborative and love working in a team environment to strengthen your practice. You view mistakes as a way to learn and are therefore eager to dissect them with peers to find a path for improvement.
- A strong culture builder. You believe that creating a thriving, inclusive, connected culture amongst a group is essential to the success of the group and the coach. A robust and communal culture is mission critical to achieving short and long-term success for every member of the group as individuals and as a collective. You create and sustain a culture where every member of the group, including the coach, feels and believes they are deeply known.
- Obsessive about outcomes. You have an incredibly strong record of results of achieving ambitious goals, specifically in direct and lateral coaching engagements, despite obstacles and have experience doing so in complex situations with diverse teams. Your decisions are data-driven. You also have experience in change management and are motivated to achieve extraordinary performance and cultural outcomes in the midst of change
- Self-driven and highly mature. You demonstrate an uncommon level of personal responsibility for achieving results, broadly define what is within your control, persevere in the face of challenges and you're exceptionally optimistic about what is possible. You take the initiative to do what it takes to achieve success, including sharing your successes and failures openly and fully with your team.
Job Function:
Organization Info
Listing Stats
Post Date:
Nov 27 2018
Active Until:
Dec 27 2018
Hiring Organization:
Teach For America
industry:
Nonprofit