Senior Managing Director, Program

ROLE TITLE: Senior Managing Director, Program (Full Time)

POSITION REPORTS TO: Kristen Quinn, Vice President, Chief of Staff

PRIORITY APPLICATION DEADLINE: Thursday, April 17, 2025

LOCATION: Chicagoland area required 

WHAT YOU’LL DO

Teach For America – Greater Chicago – Northwest Indiana seeks a Senior Managing Director, Program to set the direction and ensure the success of our local Ignite (high dosage tutoring) and corps (first- and second-year teachers) program. Your leadership and collaboration with colleagues will directly support our next generation of education leaders in our region.

As an ideal candidate, you have demonstrated success leading and influencing colleagues within and across teams toward shared goals. Your current and past colleagues call you a dream collaborator. You’ve got a knack for helping people understand their unique role in a strategy and connecting them with one another. You can build a team culture that fosters collaboration and impact orientation. You’re also decisive. You consider the appropriate context, short- and long-term impacts, and who is most impacted by a decision and know when to deliberate and when to move swiftly. You’re proud of your project management skills and can juggle several workstreams and teams at once. Finally, you are people and coaching oriented, using every interaction as an opportunity to bring out the best in your colleagues.

Ultimately, this job will position you to advance learning and life opportunities for local students by ensuring our tutors and first- and second-year teachers are making a profound impact on student outcomes today and developing the long-term leadership skills necessary to fight for education system wide transformation as alumni.

You will report to the Vice President, Chief of Staff and sit on the Greater Chicago-Northwest Indiana team. You will partner with the Senior Managing Director, Leadership Development to co-manage Managing Directors, Leadership Development around corps member support. You will partner closely with our recruitment team around building our next generation of corps members and with our Ignite team around supporting Ignite Fellows locally. You will also collaborate across our local regional team and development staff to ensure our Ignite and corps program are aligned to our local strategy.. This is a Chicagoland based role.

WHAT YOU’LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR

• Set and manage the vision and direction for our local corps program, using local context, our larger arc of member experience (applicant to alumni), and the organization-wide program model. You will do this in close collaboration with Managing Directors, Leadership Development and our regional staff. You will lead project manage this vision from matriculation and onboarding through pre-service (initial summer training) through the two-year corps commitment to the transition to alumnihood. This includes answering the following questions and executing accordingly:

  • What kind of impact do we hope corps members will have on their schools and students in our region specifically? How will we measure that? How will we support them toward it? What kinds of additional professional and leadership development will we offer locally? How does graduate school coursework play a role?

  • What should our Greater Chicago-Northwest Indiana corps member community feel like? How will staff support corps members to build that community? What kinds of community building spaces will we offer locally?

  • What skills, knowledge and mindsets will corps members build so they are prepared to lead for educational progress as alumni in our region? How will we help them develop?

• Serve as a co-manager of Managing Directors, Leadership Development alongside a central team Senior Managing Director, Leadership Development. In this co-management relationship, the Senior Managing Director, Leadership Development is responsible for “capabilities management” (helping MD,LDs execute our central program model), while you are responsible for “values management” (helping MD,LDs put that central program model in the context of our region).

• Collaborate with our Managing Director, Partnerships to ensure our school partnerships, Ignite, and corps program visions and strategies serve to support schools toward their student outcome goals

• Serve as our Regional Ignite Lead, making sure our national Ignite program has thriving school partnerships and the support locally to realize their tutoring impact goals

• Partner with our national and local recruitment team to set goals and inform the strategy for finding our next generation of leaders for the corps

• Partner with our Matriculation Generalist to set the vision and direction for how incoming corps members will onboard to our region before their first summer training, including how we will support retention, community building, certification testing, and more.

• Engage with our local education landscape through events, meeting with community partners, and staying plugged into the news. Use your learning and the connections you form to shape and support our local program.

• Contribute to our organization-wide and regional success by supporting member, supporter, and partner programming as needed

• Engage in team responsibilities to strengthen our collective work, including check ins, team meetings, professional development, data management, interviewing applicants for Ignite and the corps, and matriculating new members.

A WEEK IN THE LIFE

Over the course of any week, the Senior Managing Director of Program will spend time: 

• Meeting with Managing Directors, Leadership Development and members of the Ignite, regional, and recruitment teams to ensure our Ignite Fellows and corps members are making progress toward our local school’s student outcome goals and that our members are developing as life-long leaders for educational equity

• Visiting schools to gather evidence of our contributions to Chicagoland schools and analyzing observations and a wealth of data to adjust our strategy accordingly

• Drafting and executing project plans for big workstreams, including, but not limited to, Pre-Service (first year summer teacher training), corps culture, and Ignite school partner support

• Hosting an evening webinar for incoming corps members, preparing them for their responsibilities and opportunities as corps members

• Joining a recruitment team member at a local college campus to talk to prospects about our Ignite and corps programs

• Collaborating closely with the Senior Managing Director, Leadership Development, who sits on the central team, to set vision and direction for our shared corps member program and collaborate on progress and MD,LD performance

Note: While this person will have a great deal of autonomy to design their schedule through most of the year, our seven-week Pre-Service program during the summer has a regimented and rigorous schedule. During July in particular, this person should expect to be at schools from 8:00-4:30PM Monday through Friday.

YOUR EXPERIENCE

Your areas of knowledge and expertise that matter most for this role (minimum qualifications): 

• At least 10 years of relevant work experience, including teaching and instructional coaching

• Preferred 3+ years of management experience

• Strong instructional knowledge and an understanding of teacher development and coaching

• Strong knowledge and connections in the Chicago and/or Northwest Indiana education landscape

• Compelling communicator, and inspire others to action: experience collaborating across organizational & institutional boundaries to achieve outcomes

• Believer in the power of educators to disrupt systems that hold our students back from reaching their hopes and aspirations: able to lead in key spaces in crucial moments while always representing our core values

• Ability to develop data systems and analyze data to improve strategies and outcomes

• Project manager who can juggle many workstreams at the same time while keeping yourself and others on track to hit major milestones and achieve result

• Ability to work nights and/or weekends 2-3 times a quarter

• Ability to travel out of region for conferences 2-3 times a year

YOUR FUTURE TEAM

Here in Greater Chicago-Northwest Indiana, our local vision for educational equity is that the students of today will be the leaders of tomorrow at every level in our community. Our unique value add as Teach For America is to be the premier talent recruiters, matchers, and developers to our local community of fellow education leaders as we collaborate toward this vision. We do this by forming deep partnership with our local schools, understanding their goals, and rallying our network of prospects, Ignite Fellows, corps members, alumni and supporters to work in lock step toward those goals. You will be a part of our regional team of ten staff members working alongside partners inside and outside our organization to One Day.

YOUR COMPENSATION
The applicable salary range for each U.S.-based role is based on where the employee works and is aligned to one of 3 tiers according to a cost of labor index in that geographic area. Starting pay for the successful applicant will depend on a variety of job-related factors, which may include education, training, experience, location, business needs, or market demands. New hires are typically brought into the organization at a salary between the range minimum and the salary range midpoint depending on qualifications, internal equity, and the budgeted amount for the role. The expected starting salary range for this role is set forth below. This range may be modified in the future:

Salary Tier B (Greater Chicago–Northwest Indiana) - $123,100 - $158,600

You can view which tier applies to where you plan to work here. If your location is not listed, please click here for additional total rewards information