Why You'll Love This Role:

We are seeking a Learning Experience Designer (LXD) to be a key driver in the development and production of high-quality instructional materials for our supplemental K-12 English Language Arts (ELA) product. This role is ideal for a hands-on curriculum builder with a strong foundation in ELA pedagogy who is passionate about creating engaging, standards-aligned lessons, activities, texts, and assessments for K-12 students.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Content Creation and Curation

  • Material Authoring: Directly write, design, and structure detailed lessons, activities, and student worksheets/interactives based on established instructional models and product specifications.
  • Text Selection and Editing: Identify, vet, and edit grade-appropriate student-facing texts (fiction and non-fiction) to ensure they align with ELA learning objectives and provide rich opportunities for skills practice.
  • Assessment Design: Develop clear and concise low-stakes formative and summative assessment items and rubrics (e.g., multiple-choice, short answer, essay prompts) that effectively measure student progress against specific learning outcomes and standards.
  • Quality Assurance: Review and provide focused editorial and pedagogical feedback on content drafts produced by internal teams or external contributors or vendors, ensuring accuracy, fidelity to the curriculum model, and student engagement.

  Science of Reading Best Practices and Curriculum Alignment

  • Instructional Application: Apply fundamental, evidence-based principles of learning science, including best practices for reading comprehension, language or vocabulary acquisition, and writing mechanics, to the design of every lesson, activity and assessment.
  • Science of Reading: Stay up to date with research and best practices for teaching students how to leverage the pillars of the science of reading including phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, reading comprehension and vocabulary.
  • Standards Adherence: Ensure all content development strictly adheres to relevant state ELA standards across the K-12 continuum.
  • Accessibility and Scaffolding: Design materials with embedded scaffolds and differentiation strategies to make content accessible and meaningful for a wide range of learners, including Multilingual Learners (MLLs).

  Collaboration and Workflow

  • Team Coordination: Work effectively with freelance contributors, other learning experience designers, and product managers to ensure content quality is consistently high.
  • Feedback: Provide detailed and consistent feedback to contributors to ensure output meets Newsela’s high quality standards. Ensure all feedback is rooted in documentation from Newsela or in ELA best practices.
  • Organization: Prioritize and deliver work on time and within Newsela’s standards of quality. Understand Newsela’s quality standards and their purposes, so they can be effectively applied across all content.
  • Learning Design: Translate high-level blueprints into detailed design specifications and content outlines that guide a scalable and consistent content development process that leverages AI tools, human contributors and staff.

About You:

• Required
  • Education: Bachelor’s degree in Instructional Design, Education, Curriculum & Instruction, English, Journalism or a related field.
  • Experience: 3+ years of experience in K-12 curriculum development, instructional design, or content creation, preferably for an educational technology or publishing company.
  • ELA Knowledge: Strong working knowledge of K-12 ELA pedagogy, standards, and effective teaching methods.
  • Content Skills: Excellent writing and editing with demonstrated ability to produce high-quality, polished instructional content.
  • Fluency with AI tools
  • Other: Strong organizational skills as well as verbal communication skills and ability to prioritize and re-prioritize in conjunction with business needs.
• Preferred
  • Prior classroom teaching experience (K-12 ELA).
  • Experience working with digital content authoring tools or content management systems (CMS).

All offers of employment are contingent upon the successful completion of a background check as part of our pre-employment process.

Why you’ll love working at Newsela:

• Health & Wellness: Comprehensive medical benefits with employer contribution to premiums and to HSA accounts. Additional benefits such as gym reimbursement, pet insurance, free access to the Calm app, Rocket Lawyer and more to help you stay healthy: mind, body, and soul.
• Work From Home: We are a fully remote company. We provide a monthly tech stipend to support your WFH needs!
• Supporting ALL Families: Inclusive benefits to support you and your family, including parental leave, fertility support, adoption, and more!
• Financial Wellbeing: Invest in your future with our 401(k) plan, which includes a employer match to help you build long-term financial security.
• Time Off: Flexible PTO, paid sick time off, company holidays plus winter break (Dec 24th - Jan 1st).
• Professional Development: Newsela offers an annual learning and development allowance to employees to attend external training sessions, classes, workshops, conferences, and educational materials to foster professional growth within their current role and career aspirations at Newsela.
• Make A Difference: No matter your role or department, the work you do each day helps share the future of education and improves the lives of students and teachers.

About Newsela:

Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K–12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela’s solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner.

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