Senior Director, Design for the Middle School Math Initiative

Responsibilities

• Defines and leads the vision for multi-year professional learning across districts, grades, and schools, ensuring coherence between curriculum, leadership & teacher development, assessment, and facilitation
• Anticipates opportunities for alignment across functions and intervenes early to maintain system-wide coherence
• Collaborates proactively with internal teams to ensure implementation decisions support organizational strategy and long-term student outcomes
• Translates research and organizational goals into actionable strategies that guide multiple design teams while keeping long-term student outcomes central
• Makes high-stakes design trade-offs across multiple schools or districts, balancing fidelity, innovation, and scalability
• Owns end-to-end professional learning design at the system level, ensuring tools, frameworks, and session designs are coherent, research-informed, and implementable across diverse contexts
• Establishes standards, protocols, and quality benchmarks that connect design with how sessions are implemented, enabling consistency across facilitators and districts
• Guides Director-level designers in making design decisions, clarifying when adjustments should be made in content vs. facilitation, and when to escalate strategic issues
• Navigates ambiguity across multiple teams, conflicting district priorities, and incomplete or evolving data to make timely, high-impact decisions
• Makes high-stakes implementation decisions that balance fidelity, innovation, and scalability across multiple schools and districts
• Prioritizes resources, timelines, and supports in complex or competing situations to maintain momentum and system-level impact
• Defines and tracks multi-horizon success metrics: immediate session-level outcomes, short-term teacher/leader practice changes, annual growth, and multi-year system-wide impact
• Aggregates and synthesizes data across schools and districts to identify systemic patterns, evaluate fidelity, and adjust design strategies proactively
• Ensures that PL design decisions drive measurable improvements in student outcomes while supporting leader and teacher capacity to sustain change
• Builds and leads a high-functioning design division
• Develops pipelines of design leaders who can independently manage complex PL initiatives across multiple districts
• Establishes structures, feedback loops, and routines that allow teams to operate with autonomy while maintaining alignment with organizational priorities
• Clearly communicates design vision, priorities, and outcomes to internal teams, senior leadership, district partners, and the field
• Anticipates points of misalignment or confusion in design translation and proactively intervenes to maintain clarity and consistency
• Models MMI’s values and ensures they are embedded across all design work and team interactions

Qualifications and Traits

• 10+ years of experience designing, facilitating, or overseeing professional learning for teachers, school leaders, and district leaders
• Secondary Mathematics Expertise: Deep knowledge of secondary mathematics (grades 3–12), including math content knowledge (MCK), math knowledge for teaching (MKT), and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) to foster student math identity and improve instructional practice
• Research & Design Expertise: Demonstrated ability to translate complex research into multi-year learning arcs that develop both teacher expertise and leader capacity to scale improvements
• Systems Leadership: Strong ability to navigate complex, interconnected systems (districts/schools) to drive measurable improvements in math teaching and student outcomes at scale
• Implementation Oversight: Experience establishing expectations for facilitator protocols and feedback loops; expertise in monitoring fidelity and adaptation across multiple schools or workstreams
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Proven skill using teacher, leader, and student data—as well as formative evaluation results—to inform program design and strategic improvements
• Team Leadership: Experience leading and coaching teams of facilitators or school leaders; ability to identify patterns and recurring challenges to guide a team toward strategic solutions
• Communication & Trust: Excellent communication skills and the ability to build trust and rapport with educators, leaders, and colleagues across multiple teams