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Vice President, Systems Reinvention

This job is no longer available

United States
Full-time

The Vice President, Systems Reinvention will help establish, design, and execute a world-class Systems Learning Lab (“the Lab”) that fuels learning for Teach For America’s 51 regions and keeps the organization on the vanguard of educational innovation. In this role, you will lead in the Lab’s research and development as you collaboratively design tools, resources, experiences, and experiments that accelerate the Lab’s participating regions’ abilities to drive systems change and reinvention in their communities. You will help develop strategy for the Lab and work in close partnership with the selected regions on their localized approach, subsequently aligning systems and structures to ensure deep, actionable learning for participants. This will require you to regularly assess impact, analyze data, synthesize insights, make meaning for internal and external audiences, and iterate quickly on redesigns. You will work in close collaboration with a top-notch team of intrapreneurs who are charting the future direction of Teach For America and a carefully curated set of external experts in order to drive the most powerful learning for the education sector. 

Areas of Responsibility: 
  • Drive development of the Lab’s strategy and work with senior leaders across the organization to shape, evolve, and implement a vision for innovative, systems-change leadership
  • Partner deeply with the Executive Director and Regional Innovation Lead from the Lab’s participating regions to create, evaluate, and iterate upon pilots aimed to develop more corps members and alumni to make breakthroughs in real problems of practice related to systems reinvention
  • Build systems and protocols to evaluate learning and impact, ensuring participants are better equipped to affect systems change in their communities
  • Act as a catalyst and facilitator in the identification, evaluation, and sharing of innovative solutions that improve organizational performance and foster collective learning
  • Ensure that organizational learning and accompanying systems, tools, and processes that drive creative thinking are both strongly informed by and strongly inform our strategic priorities and fundamental strategic questions
  • Consult the Co-Founders of the Systems Learning Lab on best practices and acclaimed research within 21st Century learning, improvement science, and systems level change aligned to the Lab’s impact
  • Represent TFA in key forums, including presentations to TFA’s Management Team and at external conferences on topics related to innovation, 21st century learning, etc.
Educational Background: 
Bachelor’s degree required; relevant advanced degree strongly preferred but not required
Skills/Experience: 
  • Is an expert in research and development methods and improvement science
  • Brings expertise in 21st century learning methodologies
  • Has a proven track record of codifying change at the systems level and inspiring diverse stakeholders using meaningful narration, practices, and/or rituals for learning and reflection (asks the right questions to facilitate the synthesis of learnings)
  • Is adept at bringing others closer to the journey of learning and change by sharing insights and discoveries of the processes (capturing the artifacts, images, moments, and stories that illustrate and inspire those on the periphery); brings ideas for how to partner with TFA’s Org-Wide Learning and Strategy (OWLS) team for how to tell the story of the Lab to those not in it
  • Is excited to operate as an education consultant and creator across a diverse array of regional clients and has experience leading clients through this dynamic process of research, program evaluation, and training
  • Spikes in strategic thinking, including the ability to take big, abstract ideas and make them concrete, actionable, and user-friendly
  • Is naturally a doer, moves quickly from theorizing, to exploring, to developing, testing, and implementing; less interested in pontificating than in diving into creation
  • Is voraciously curious; constantly draws upon learnings and methodologies from various disciplines and experiences while integrating across sectors; seeks and is inspired by divergent ideas, finding inspiration in unlikely places
  • Thrives in ambiguity
  • Is grounded in and pursuing equity, diversity, and inclusivity while constantly interrogating dynamics of power and privilege within themselves and pushing others to do the same at the micro and macro levels in an endeavor to uproot and dismantle oppression

Prior Experience

  • 10+ years of exceptional performance in strategy, research, design, program evaluation, consulting, or similar roles
  • Experience at schools sites and/or teacher development/coaching preferred
  • Embodies conviction around Teach For America’s mission and Theory of Change and exemplifies TFA’s core values; holds deep belief that educational inequity is a massive, urgent injustice, TFA plays a crucial role in the long-term fight for change, and we need to enlist as many outstanding, diverse leaders as we can to join the corps

Skills:

  • Ability to build and maintain strong relationships with leaders across an organization and operate with utmost cultural competence, integrity, ethics, maturity, discretion, confidence, and respect and humility
  • Ability to drive cross-functional change by working collaboratively in dynamic organizational environments
  • Possesses distinct skill and experience in understanding complex organizational problems, disaggregating and analyzing them, synthesizing the resulting learnings into actionable recommendations, exploring innovative solutions, co-developing and testing pilots, and improving future implementations
  • Possesses exemplary verbal and written communication skills, including an ability to communicate ideas to others clearly, simply, and compellingly, as a strong storyteller
  • Strong self-awareness and ability to independently self-reflect

Work Demands:

  • Working with colleagues across the country leveraging remote technologies (e.g. phone, video conference)
  • Ability to travel to in-person meetings in various U.S. cities (up to 50% of time)
  • Willingness to work some weekends and evenings
  • Participate in staff-wide responsibilities, such as the selection of prospective corps members

Organization Info

Teach For America

Overview
Headquarters: 
New York, NY, United States
Annual Budget : 
$100-500M
Founded: 
1993
About Us
Areas of Focus: 
Mission: 

Teach For America is the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates, professionals, or graduate students who commit to teach for two years in urban and rural public schools and become lifelong leaders in expanding educational opportunity. Teach For America's mission is to enlist, develop, and mobilize as many as possible of our nation's most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence. In the 2016-2017 school year, 6,900 first- and second-year Teach For America corps members are teaching in 53 regions across the United States. Since 1990, Teach For America corps members have reached more than 10 million students. Teach For America's more than 40,000 alumni are providing critical leadership -- as teachers, school and district leaders; elected officials and policy advisers; and founders and leaders of education and social reform initiatives -- to ensure all children have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.

Listing Stats

Post Date: 
May 13 2019
Active Until: 
Jun 13 2019
Hiring Organization: 
Teach For America
industry: 
Nonprofit