Director of Learning Design

Tergar International•Madison, WI

3d•$75,000 - $100,000•Remote

About The Position

Tergar Schools is a Buddhist-inspired K–12 education nonprofit building a new model of learning (MOL). They operate a pilot school in Kathmandu, Nepal, and are constructing a larger campus in the Yolmo Valley in the Himalayas. Their model is based on the idea that every child possesses basic goodness and its qualities of awareness, love, compassion, wisdom, and joy, and that educators should help children recognize this and provide tools to sustain it. Their aspiration is to help form resilient, altruistic, and joyful individuals. The organization is expanding its reach by developing a comprehensive, secular model that can be integrated into any school's existing structure, aiming to impact over 100 schools in 4+ countries within five years. This role is crucial for building the model itself, including products, courses, training materials, and classroom materials, and for leading the team that develops them. Currently, this thinking is primarily held by the Executive Director and the founding team, which is not sustainable for scaling. The organization seeks an outside-the-box thinker with contemplative experience, excited by the challenge of creating an entire family of products from scratch.

Requirements

Deep pedagogical expertise, understanding how children and adults learn and having designed for it.
Proven ability to build and deliver programs, curricula, or training that real teachers use.
Fluency in a lean approach to product design, with experience in strategic experiments, problem/solution and product/market fit, and validated learning.
Real, lived contemplative experience (not necessarily in Tergar's lineage).
Comfortable being hands-on initially and then stepping back to build standards and training for a team.
Ability to build lean and aim for world-class quality simultaneously.
Substantial experience in education (teacher, school leader, curriculum developer, or learning designer) with a track record of building and delivering with limited resources.
Experience directing, mentoring, or building a team from scratch.
Comfort working directly from a founder’s evolving vision rather than a finished brief.
Discernment in decision-making, knowing which calls are theirs to make and which require consultation.
Genuine curiosity about and respect for traditions that may differ from their own.
Comfortable with ambiguity and a mandate that may evolve.

Nice To Haves

A tech or startup background alongside pedagogical expertise.

Responsibilities

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, including adaptable toolkits, a playbook for staff and administrators, and family-facing materials.
Run the model as a product, forming hypotheses about teacher and school needs, testing them in live classrooms, and allowing learnings to shape development.
Propose what gets built now and what waits, defending these decisions based on the principles of building lean and being the best in the world (Minimum Viable Mastery).
Be personally hands-on with new partner schools in Nepal during their onboarding in 2027, working in tandem with the Executive Director.
Use learnings from the initial schools to define a stable first phase and build the template for other schools.
Decide on the necessary team structure and hiring order, including roles like Nepal Country Director and Trainer, Country Coordinators, strategic consultants, instructional designers, and a UX researcher.
Transition authority for model fidelity from the current leaders to yourself as a track record is built, marked by a completed first onboarding cycle with partner schools.
Transform multi-day sessions into usable materials for the team, such as recorded sessions, distilled content, and integrated training modules.
Partner with the research lab in Nepal, translating their findings into product and training decisions.