Director of Foundational Literacy

About inquirED

inquirED supports teachers with high-quality instructional materials that make joyful, rigorous, and transferable learning possible for every student. Our pre-K/TK and elementary curricula include Great First Eight (Pre-K/TK), Inkwell (K–2 integrated ELA and social studies), and Inquiry Journeys (K–5 social studies). Together, they help students develop the deeper knowledge, comprehension, literacy, and inquiry skills they need to grow as readers, writers, thinkers, and participants in a thriving democracy.

About the role

Description

We're building Inkwell, an integrated K–5 Core ELA and Core social studies curriculum designed to help elementary students become strong readers, writers, thinkers, and citizens while making meaningful social studies instruction possible within the literacy block.

We are seeking a Director of Foundational Literacy to lead the 0-to-1 design and development of the foundational literacy instruction that will weave through and intentionally connect with Inkwell's knowledge-building ELA and social studies curriculum.

This person will own the instructional architecture of Inkwell's foundational literacy strand across K–5: establishing its research base and instructional principles, developing the scope and sequence, defining lesson architecture, instructional routines, design specifications, and quality criteria, shaping its approach to assessment and differentiation, and leading development of the materials themselves. That means building the K–2 foundation while fully defining how foundational literacy evolves through grades 3–5 in response to students' development and grade-level expectations.

These decisions shape the daily experience of the teachers and students using the materials, so the Director is accountable for usability as much as instructional quality — how a routine is structured, how a lesson is paced, what a teacher has to manage to run it — and works in close partnership with product and design.

The strand also has to fit within Inkwell's broader instructional vision, architecture, schedule, and student experience. The Director will work with Inkwell's academic and product leadership to determine where foundational literacy should intentionally connect to knowledge-building, vocabulary, oral language, writing, and content, and where the integrity of a systematic foundational skills progression requires it to follow its own instructional sequence.

We're looking for someone with deep expertise in how children learn to read and the curriculum design judgment to turn that research into an instructional system that is rigorous, coherent, usable, engaging, and scalable.

Ideal Candidate Profile:

- You have deep knowledge of the research on how children learn to read and write, and how students and instruction change from kindergarten through grade 5. You understand foundational literacy as broader than phonics alone, with strong command of phonological and phonemic awareness, the alphabetic principle, phoneme-grapheme correspondences, decoding and encoding, orthographic patterns, high-frequency and irregular words, syllable patterns, morphology, spelling, handwriting/transcription, fluency, and connected-text reading — and of how these skills develop over time and interact with oral language, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing.

- You have applied that expertise at program scale, across a multi-grade, multi-component curriculum or instructional system, and you can envision the full system: not only what students need to learn, but the sequence in which they should learn it; how new learning should be modeled and practiced; how decoding and encoding should reinforce one another; how previously taught skills should be cumulatively reviewed; how connected text should provide meaningful application; how fluency should develop over time; and what materials, assessment, differentiation, and teacher guidance are needed to bring it to life.

- You understand the di