Head of Instructional Systems Design and Monitoring

About Bridge International Academies

Bridge International Academies is a startup revolutionizing education across Africa with a truly unique business model. The company has launched a large-scale network of ultra low-cost for-profit private primary schools across Africa. With 22 schools operational, the company is already the largest chain of private primary schools on the Continent. Our schools profitably deliver high-quality education for less than $4 per child per month. In the last twenty-four months, we have grown from 1 to 22 schools, 10 to over 200 employees, proven the model and built out the systems to pave the way for aggressive expansion. The company plans to build the world’s largest private school system and scale to serve more than 1 million families across Africa and beyond.

About this position

We have and are continuing to develop one of the most sophisticated instructional approaches to providing affordable education to MILLIONS of children in one of the most challenging environments in the world! These systems, tools and approaches form our “School in a Box.”

Our instructional system enables teachers from the local slum community who come to us with a minimum of secondary school education and no teaching experience, to be extremely effective in the classroom. Teachers are overseen and managed by a school manager from the community implementing a specialized support and oversight system, monitored and audited by a field-based operations team from headquarters.

The core instructional pieces of our “School in a Box” model include:

• - a Direct Instruction or scripted curriculum (word for word, action-by-action scripts for every lesson in the classroom) based on the national syllabus, with an integrated continuous assessment program.
• - an intensive teacher training program (both induction and ongoing teacher support systems in the field),
• - an integrated tutoring program to ensure that students don’t fall behind
• - an extended day/week schedule to allow for maximum “time on task”
• - an instructional compliance system managed by both school managers at the school as well as headquarters-based school support officers, that include weekly instructional compliance reviews, detailed classroom observation rubrics, multi-part instructional oversight and compliance checklists, random spot checks and guided review of assessment results and tutoring placement records, etc.
• - detailed and rigorous policies around everything from classroom management, instructional progression, attendance, discipline, etc

This system is complemented with extensive training, support, guidance and frequent auditing at multiple levels. We call this our “School in Box” model. Due to the standardization and systematizing, our overall operational approach is most similar to that of other well-run, large-scale chains of service businesses, such as those in retail and food services. The critical difference being that our service is world-class quality ultra-affordable primary education.

We are seeing a full-time Head of Instructional Systems Design and Monitoring who along with our existing Heads of Curriculum Development and Teacher Training will form a core part of the educational team at Bridge International.

The Head of Instructional Systems Design and Monitoring will be responsible for

• 1. Improving and developing the many instructional tools and processes that are necessary for ensuring that our approach produces replicable, scalable, high quality education for millions of students. Some example of these tools include:
  • Classroom Observational Tools used by School Managers & Support Officers
  • Detailed Weekly Instructional Monitoring Rubric and Checklist (our current one runs through almost 200 key areas)
  • Assessment Recording tools used by teachers
  • Tutoring record keeping tools used by teachers
• 2. The redesign of a number of the core instructional structures at the school. Some examples of these include:
  • Academic schedule/calendar
  • Approach for effectively utilizing tutoring time and optional Saturday school
  • Exam reviews & administration
  • Homework grading procedures
• 3. Undertaking structured and unstructured independent field observations and regular assessments of the effectiveness of our instructional model and implementation. These observations and assessments will be done both personally and through the building of a small team to regularly provide feedback on the instructional implementation.

• 4. Being the direct interface between the School Operations teams who have direct responsibility and oversight for the schools and the Education Teams for instructional issues that aren’t able to be handled by the normal school or support levels.

• 5. Incorporating feedback and learnings from:
  • a. Instructional Design & Monitoring team’s regular visits, monitoring and assessments
  • b. Feedback from the school operations team
  • c. Input from the other Instructional teams
  • d. Incorporation of data from our academic assessments
  • in order to continuously improve the instructional elements of our “school in a box”.

This is an IDEAL job for a systems-oriented superstar with 5+ years of educational expertise.

About You

• You are one of those rare multi-talented people who is both deeply creative and analytical.
• You bring with you deep and broad experience across many facets of the educational process, but most importantly have demonstrated capacity to think way outside the box in identifying critical educational issues and developing non-traditional approaches to solve them.
• You know that a great teacher is not born, but made. Teaching is a skill that can be taught.
• In particular you have experience developing systems of oversight to ensure that appropriate instruction is happening in the classroom.
• You have experience in assessing and monitoring instructional processes and academic achievement in a multi-school scaled setting.
• Experience working with schools in the developing world is a plus, especially Africa, but in general you would be very comfortable with living and working in the developing world.
• You love data and believe that the educational process can be particularly data-rich. You are incredibly data-driven, analytical, and excited about developing an academic environment and processes in which high-quality data is regularly collected and used to manage and improve our franchise-like schools.
• You are not afraid of getting your hands dirty, and will thrive on the opportunity to both design and monitor implementation of instructional systems.
• You have experience managing projects with many moving pieces, and building and managing teams of people.
• You are comfortable and familiar with identifying, analyzing, interpreting and applying the results of appropriate high-quality educational research.
• You function well in a fast-paced informal environment where constant change is the norm and the bar for quality is set high.
• Bachelors or Masters degree required (education degree a plus).

Our team has a passionate belief that basic primary education is critical to the development of every child, family, community and nation. We believe that it is possible to address this critical need for poor families through new and innovative approaches leveraging the private sector, and that by providing low-cost but high-quality primary education, we will give millions of children the opportunity to accomplish their dreams. We are looking for a leader who wants to join us in this rewarding task.

Job Location

• Nairobi, Kenya

How to Apply

• Apply online at http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=obBIVfw9&s=emails