Early Elementary Teacher, Alpha - $100,000/year USD

About the role

Alpha is reimagining what a teacher can be. Students finish their entire academic core in about two hours each morning, working independently on AI-adaptive apps — no lectures, no textbooks, no pacing guide. The rest of the day is spent on life-skills workshops. Adults here are called Guides rather than teachers: you are not delivering content. You are making sure your students actually do the work, want to do the work, and get unstuck when the app can't do it for them. You are with the same students from morning launch to closing: core learning, workshops, lunch, recess, check-chart time.

Responsibilities

• Running short structured-literacy workshops with two to four students — diagnosing a phonics or decoding gap from running records and fluency probes, teaching a sequence you designed for it, and checking that it transferred
• Coaching students through app-based core learning: seeing who has stalled, asking the question that unsticks them, holding the daily goal
• Leading morning launch, life-skills workshops, and check-chart activities that keep six-year-olds moving
• Driving students to their weekly app goals with school currency, leaderboards, and gamification pitched at their age
• Staying with your students through lunch, recess, and closing, meeting refusal and frustration with a plan built for that particular child
• Pull two to four kids and run a fifteen-minute workshop built for that exact error pattern — phoneme-grapheme mapping, blending drills, decodable text, whatever it calls for — check that it transferred, and send them back to work on their own
• Get every K-3 student to their daily learning goals, and close the reading gaps that keep them from getting there on their own

What you won't be doing

• Nightly full-class lesson planning is not part of this role. Your planning is narrow and diagnostic: who needs you tomorrow, and what will actually move them
• Running a pull-out caseload from a quiet intervention room. Reading groups are roughly a tenth of your week and happen inside the day, not beside it
• Delivering a published program with fidelity to someone else's scope and sequence
• Writing IEPs and 504 plans, chasing testing paperwork, or sitting on curriculum committees
• Handing your students off while you take a prep block. You are with them launch to closing

Requirements

• Willing to work on-site at one of the campuses listed above, with relocation support
• At least 3 years working directly with children ages 4-9: teaching, coaching, tutoring, camps, youth programs, children's theater, or similar settings where kids showed up because of you
• At least 2 years of that experience teaching reading in grades K-3, within the last 5 years
• Completed structured-literacy training: LETRS, IMSE, Orton-Gillingham, Wilson Reading System, Fundations, UFLI, CERI, Neuhaus, SIPPS, Really Great Reading, or similar; or a master's in reading or literacy
• Bachelor's degree in any subject. A teaching certificate is not required
• Comfortable spending about 90% of your day guiding students through app-based learning, workshops, and campus routines, and 10% on reading sessions
• Willing to work with all K-3 students, not only struggling readers
• Legally authorized to work in the US without visa sponsorship

Nice-to-have qualifications

• You can keep a room of six-year-olds engaged with nothing but your energy and a good activity
• Tired children kept coming back to your after-school or summer program
• Experience with reading platforms (Amira, Lexia, i-Ready) or diagnostic assessments (DRA, DIBELS, AIMSweb)
• You can name a specific child whose decoding you fixed, and say how you did it
• You have worked in a non-traditional school model: charter, micro-school, Montessori, or hybrid

Pay

$100,000/year salaried, paid weekly, with day-one health, dental, and vision benefits.

Schedule

40 hours/week, five days a week, on-site at one Alpha campus.

Locations

Current openings: AZ - Phoenix and Scottsdale; OK - Oklahoma City and Tulsa; TX - Dallas, Fort Worth (Keller), Plano, and The Woodlands; UT - Park City (Salt Lake City). Interested in a different Alpha campus? Apply anyway, name your preferred location, and we will route you to the right opening.