Job Opportunity for Project Lead (Classroom Instruction and Practice) at Central Square Foundation in New Delhi

About Central Square Foundation (CSF)

Founded in 2012, Central Square Foundation is a non-profit philanthropic foundation working with the vision of ensuring quality school education for all children in India. CSF has a mission focused on ensuring high-quality foundational learning for all children in India. To achieve this, we partner with individuals and social impact organizations to bring innovative solutions in education to build the capacity of the government to drive systemic impact. To know more about us and our work, visit www.centralsquarefoundation.org.

About the Classroom Instruction and Practice team

CSF has adopted a system reform approach where we partner with State governments to design and scale high-quality foundational learning programs. Our focus is on improving the existing state programs and to this end, the CIP team works on raising the quality of tools, training, and support available for teachers and academic support personnel implementing foundational learning in the classroom. We do this by collaborating with our program partners in states in improving their programs, curating and designing research-backed exemplar public goods, and generating evidence on different aspects in early learning through action research.

Position Summary

The Project Lead, CIP will be responsible for facilitating the high-quality implementation of the FLN program in collaboration with our program partners in different States. He/she will achieve this by building capacity in different internal and external stakeholders by designing protocols, quality scorecards and setting up sustainable systems. A professional with experience in designing and implementing large scale education transformation programs in government or affordable private school space is ideal for this role.

Key Responsibilities: This is a multi-faceted role to take end-to-end ownership of implementation quality of programs working closely with our technical partners and other CSF teams.

Teacher training and mentoring design

• Design teacher professional development framework and protocols aligned to the structured pedagogy approach
• Review teacher training modules designed by academic partners and give feedback based on field observations
• Co-create a protocol for teacher mentors with program partners leveraging insights from the observations
• Design quality scorecards/checklists for partners to review their own teacher training modules
  Implementation Quality assuranceCo-create dashboards to track the implementation progress of the FLN program by program partners in different states
• Conduct field visits to see how the FLN instructional material (Teacher guides, Student workbooks, and TLM) is being used in the classroom
• Ensure feedback from the ground is incorporated into the design in either the same or future versions

Field action research

• Observe cascades of teacher training (from Master trainers to teachers) and generate insights on cascade loss and how to minimize it
• Shadow teacher mentors during training sessions and coaching and generate insights on the most effective inputs
• Knowledge generation and advocacyDraft research reports, white papers, OpEds with learning and insights from large scale implementation of structured pedagogy based FLN programs
• Provide need-based support to internal CSF teams on creating reports, conducting training, and designing tools for FLN instruction Eg. a digital teacher training module on FLN designed for CBSE.
• Travel20-30% of the work time of this role will be field travel to tier 2,3 towns in our focus states****

Skills and Qualifications: Ideal candidate should have a strong on-ground implementation experience of large-scale education programs backed by a solid background in evidence-based pedagogy, curriculum development, assessment, teacher preparation and instructional coaching.

• Strong academic background from a reputed institute with a post-graduation or a fellowship in education
• At least 5+ years of hands-on education on-ground program implementation experience in a demanding education enterprise or non-profit workplace, designing and implementing large-scale programs, designing training modules and coaching/mentoring protocols, supporting teacher-coaches, solving implementation breakdowns (especially in low-capacity settings)
• Ability to model effective teaching and coaching practices drawn from own classroom teaching experience and research evidence such as structured pedagogy, balanced literacy, concrete representational abstract (CRA) in mathematics, competency-based assessment etc.
• Excellent people management and project delivery skills, including the ability to lead a small specialist team, create project plans and dashboards, drive execution, manage multiple projects at a time, influence internal and external stakeholders

Compensation

Remuneration will be competitive with Indian philanthropy pay scales and will depend upon the candidate’s experience levels.