Director of Learning Design

Tergar International•Madison, WI

17h•Remote

About The Position

Tergar Schools is a Buddhist-inspired K–12 education nonprofit building a new model of learning (MOL). We operate a pilot school in Kathmandu, Nepal, and are constructing a larger campus in the Yolmo Valley in the Himalayas. Our model rests on a simple starting point: every child possesses basic goodness and its qualities of awareness, love, compassion, wisdom, and joy. It is our job as educators to help them recognize this and give them tools to sustain it. Our long-term aspiration is to help form people who are resilient, altruistic, and joyful. We’re now building the next chapter of that work: a comprehensive, fully secular model designed to weave into any school’s existing life — not just our own campuses. Rather than build more schools ourselves, we intend to reach 100+ schools in 4+ countries within five years by helping other schools, secular or religious, adopt the model as their own. This role exists because our footprint is growing quickly. Two high-performing private schools will begin piloting our model of learning in 2027. A research lab opens in Nepal with a world-class science team. The interest is real and growing. What we don’t have yet is a full-time position for building the model itself — the products, courses, training materials, and classroom materials that will constitute MOL — and for leading the team that builds it out. Today that thinking lives mostly with our Executive Director and the instincts of our founding team. This isn’t sustainable at scale. We need someone who can be fully dedicated to this element of our project: an outside-the-box thinker with real contemplative experience, genuinely excited by the challenge of building an entire family of products from scratch rather than adapting an existing portfolio.

Requirements

Deep pedagogical expertise is essential — you understand how children and adults actually learn, and you've designed for it.
You've turned that expertise into programs, curricula, or training that real teachers use.
Fluency in a lean approach to product design. You can talk concretely about strategic experiments, problem/solution and product/market fit, and validated learning — and you have actually worked that way, not just read about it.
Real, lived contemplative experience. A genuine taste of practice, not necessarily in Tergar’s own lineage, and not merely theoretical familiarity.
Comfortable being hands-on first and stepping back later. Personally in the work with our first schools, then deliberately building the standards and training that let a team carry it without you in the room.
Able to build lean and aim to be the best in the world at the same time, without treating those as a trade-off.
Substantial experience in education — as a teacher, school leader, curriculum developer, or learning designer — and you've built something real from that experience and gotten it into people's hands without much money or staff.
Some experience directing, mentoring, or building a team from scratch, since you will be doing exactly that here.
Comfort working directly from a founder’s evolving vision rather than a finished brief — you will be co-writing the brief as you go, especially in the first months.
Discernment above all: knowing which calls are yours to make outright and which need to go to the Rinpoche or the ED.
Genuine curiosity about and respect for a tradition that may not be your own, without needing to adopt it as your own practice.
Comfortable with ambiguity and a mandate that will keep changing shape under you as the first schools teach you things no one currently knows.

Nice To Haves

A tech or startup background alongside that is a genuine asset.

Responsibilities

Building the model: Design the teacher training program at the center of the MOL — the core product. Build out the materials that make the training usable in a real school. Today we imagine adaptable toolkits fitted by hand to each school, a playbook for staff and administrators, and family-facing materials. That is a starting hypothesis, not a spec — the process of choosing what comes is yours to lead.
Run the model as a product, not a document. Form real hypotheses about what teachers and schools need, test them in live classrooms, and let what you learn change what gets built. Propose what gets built now and what waits — and defend those calls. We hold two commitments at once: build lean, and be the best in the world at this. We call it Minimum Viable Mastery. You are the person who makes that real week to week, not just in principle.
Nailing the first schools: Be personally hands-on with our new partner schools in Nepal as they begin onboarding in 2027. You will do this work in tandem with the Executive Director (ED). Use what you learn there to define what a stable first phase actually looks like, and build the real template other schools will follow.
Building your team: Decide what team you need, and in what order — a Nepal Country Director and Trainer, Country Coordinators, strategic consultants, instructional designers, a UX researcher, and others as the shape of the work becomes clear (a Head of Training in Nepal is currently being hired). The ED and the Director of Operations (DOO) authorize and execute the actual hiring. The judgment about who and when is yours.
Setting the standard, over time: Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and the ED hold final say on model fidelity today. As you build a track record — likely marked by a completed first onboarding cycle with our two partner schools — that authority shifts substantively to you. Turn Rinpoche’s two to four multi-day sessions a year into material the team can use again: recorded, distilled, built into training, rather than a remarkable conversation nobody can revisit.
Working with the evidence: Partner with the research lab opening in Nepal in late 2026 — led by Drs. Richard Davidson, Robert Roeser, and Robin Nusslock — translating what they learn into real product and training decisions.