FirstLine Schools: SPECIAL EDUCATION LEAD TEACHER
Reports to: School Principal/Assistant Principal
FLSA Status: Exempt
Position Type: Full Time
Position Summary:
FirstLine Schools is currently seeking talented, passionate Special Education Teachers. At FirstLine Schools, we know that it is the effectiveness of our teachers that matters the most when it comes to impacting the success of our students. To ensure that we are an organization of excellent teachers, we expect our teachers to demonstrate effectiveness through our Vision of Teaching Excellence. Teachers will be responsible for implementing the teaching curriculum, ensuring the success of our students, and working with a team of teachers within the school and network community.
SPED teachers are critical to helping our students who have IEPs meet their learning goals. SPED teachers regularly collaborate with a variety of student support staff members, leaders, and teachers/staff members to make sure that students' needs are being met in and out of the classroom. Our SPED teachers must be certified or working towards certification and work to ensure that our students have the necessary skills to prepare them for life, college, and beyond.
FirstLine’s Vision Of Teaching Excellence:
We develop teachers at FirstLine by focusing on excellence in teaching. To do so, we coach teachers and center professional development on our Vision of Excellence in Teaching rubric the components of which include:
On Task (Maintaining high expectations and maximizing instructional time)
Essential Content (Planning effectively)
Cognitive Engagement (Maintaining High Academic Expectations and Building Thinking Skills)
Demonstration of Learning (Leading Instruction, Checking for Understanding, Responding to Student Misunderstanding)
Community of Learners (Establishing Expectations and Responding to Student Behaviors)
Position Responsibilities:
Designs lessons that lead to standards mastery and are aligned to grade level expectations/learning connectors for students with disabilities and end-of-year assessments
Provides feedback to scholars by asking pertinent, scaffolded follow-up questions that affirm correctly understood content, clarify misunderstood content or extend scholars’ thinking
Establishes effective classroom routines and manages students effectively without disruptions (redirect inappropriate behavior)
Inspires and invests students in achieving their goals and in believing that goals are achieved through effort and not innate abilities
Prepares scholars to solve complex problems with no obvious answer
Seeks out and constructively responds to feedback from and engages in problem-solving with others
Provides IEP minutes
Ensures compliant IEP documentation for all students on caseload by facilitating IEP development, FBA/BIPs development and implementation, transition planning, and maintaining other supporting documentation related to service delivery (logs, progress reports, Extended School Year, etc)
Education & Experience:
2 or more years of lead teaching (as the teacher of record)
Demonstrated success working with students in an urban, open admissions school
A BA or BS
A strong background in and command of content area
Louisiana Teacher Certification (SPED) Completed or in progress (or be eligible to hold for our out-of-state applicants) in the specific disability/grade levels served, as necessary
Desired Qualities & Characteristics:
Believe in every student’s ability to achieve in a rigorous college or career prep curriculum
Achieve results based on agreed-upon expectations
Take personal responsibility
Highly detail-oriented
Open to learning and evolving with AI as a tool at work
Collaborate effectively with a range of stakeholders
Share a commitment to creating great schools in New Orleans
Strong written and verbal communication skills
Ability to embed and model the FirstLine Commitments: We Keep Learning, We Work Together, We Are Helpful, We Are the Safekeepers of our…