Director, Learning and Continuous Improvement

This is a full-time, remote position anywhere in the contiguous United States, with national travel expected up to 25%.

What You’ll Do

The Director of Program Learning and Continuous Improvement leads the strategic design and oversight of learning systems that drive organizational results. This role is responsible for the performance and development of a team, ensuring that data collection, validation, and quality monitoring align with broad divisional goals. The Director spearheads adaptive management practices and the evolution of the research and development learning system, documenting progress against key indicators of success to influence senior leadership decisions and organizational strategy.

Responsibilities:

Strategic System Design and Governance

• Optimizes and improves upon the research and development learning system and results frameworks to ensure they generate actionable knowledge for the organization and support disciplined continuous improvement across initiatives, pilots, and cross-functional projects
• Manages the learning system to ensure timely access to high quality, user-oriented data from a variety of sources
• Designs sophisticated measurement plans to assess key inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes of pilot initiatives
• Guides data analysts to create user-centered data visuals using tools to communicate complex insights
• Oversees and guides data analysts to create user-centered data visuals using tools to identify meaningful patterns, assess progress toward hypotheses, and inform strategic decisions
• Standardizes stage-gate criteria and output indicators to maintain high quality across all research and development phases, from sensing to scale
• Partners with project leaders to design strong learning questions, hypothesis, and measures of success that align with project needs and goals
• Designs strategies for answering learning questions, drawing on both quantitative and qualitatives methods
• Ensures timely access to high-quality, decision-useful data from multiple sources and monitors data quality and validity
• Creates structures for collaboration across project leads and senior managers to ensure shared understanding and prevent misunderstandings 
• Translates decisions from stakeholder meetings into actionable learning reports that track and measure program success
• Creates processes to capture team insights and success stories, ensuring valuable project experiences are documented and shared

Adaptive Management and Organizational Influence

• Leads the design and execution of continuous improvement cycles that help project and program leaders identify problems of practice, test improvements, interpret implementation and outcome data, and make disciplined decisions about adaptation and scale for school improvement and impact driven work
• Facilitates senior-level decision making meetings by synthesizing qualitative and quantitative evidence into clear, actionable recommendations for program and project leaders, including practical implications, tradeoffs, and next-step decisions
• Cultivates structures for cross-functional collaboration that bridges gaps between research and development, program teams, and senior leadership
• Evaluates project activities and outcomes to capture organizational lessons learned and promote best practices at scale

Team Leadership and People Management

• Manages a team of research and development professionals by providing regular coaching, feedback, and professional development to ensure high performance and engagement
• Models human-centered leadership practices to foster a culture of belonging, accountability, and psychological safety within the team
• Directs the workflow and capacity of direct reports, aligning individual contributions with the broader research and development learning agenda

Candidate Qualifications and Traits:
 

• 8+ years of experience in project management and research-based roles, with at least 3 years of experience directly managing people
• People and Performance Leadership: Mastery in coaching and developing adult learners, with a proven track record of building high-performing, cohesive teams
• Strategic Systems Thinking: Expert knowledge of research and development methodologies and learning systems to design scalable frameworks that solve complex organizational problems
• Advanced Data Literacy: Deep expertise in data architecture and visualization to translate complex datasets into compelling narratives for executive-level stakeholders
• Human-Centered Change Management: Ability to drive organizational change using human-centered design principles, ensuring that systems and processes are inclusive and effective
• Relational Influence: Ability to navigate complex interpersonal dynamics to build consensus among senior leaders and motivate cross-functional teams toward shared goals
• Adaptive Strategy Execution: Ability to lead through ambiguity and pivot organizational strategies based on emerging data and research findings

• Experience supporting curriculum implementation, instructional leadership, or school system improvement
• Experience with improvement science, design-based implementation research, program evaluation, or applied educational research and development
• Experience working with student achievement, implementation, survey, observation, and operational data in K–12 settings
• Familiarity with the realities of supporting change across districts, charter networks, and school leadership teams