Thrive Education Partners is seeking an experienced, relationship-driven Private Special Education Teacher to lead a highly personalized educational program for a middle school student in Thousand Oaks, California. We are looking for a warm, dynamic, and highly responsive educator who understands how to support a student with individualized learning needs while maintaining high expectations for growth, independence, and engagement.
Great individualized instruction starts with understanding the whole learner: where a student is academically, how they learn best, which underlying skills or learning differences may be creating barriers, and what supports will help them move forward. In this role, the educator will use that understanding to establish meaningful goals, thoughtfully adapt grade-level content, design targeted instruction, and help the student make clear, measurable progress over time.
The ideal candidate is an experienced special educator who can recognize why a student is struggling, not simply that they are struggling. This person should be comfortable adapting curriculum, breaking complex skills into manageable steps, providing explicit and systematic instruction, and adjusting their approach in real time based on student response. Just as importantly, they should be excited to build a strong relationship with one learner and create an engaging academic program around the student's strengths, interests, and needs.
This is a full-time, year-round position and the educator is the one teacher at the center of the student's week. The family is looking for someone who will stay, and a commitment of at least two years is the goal. The educator will work in close partnership with the family, an established team of support professionals, and Thrive's Educational Manager. This is an opportunity for a special educator who values strong relationships, individualized instruction, and the autonomy to build a thoughtful educational program around one student's strengths, needs, and long-term growth.
Student Profile
You'll work with a warm, social, and engaging middle school student who benefits from individualized special education instruction and a thoughtful, relationship-centered approach. The student is a strong visual learner who notices patterns quickly, takes real pride in work completed independently, and has interests, music above all, that can be used creatively to make academic work engaging and meaningful.
The student benefits from support in areas including communication, processing, self-regulation, and academic skill development. Retrieval takes time, so the answer often arrives ten to twenty seconds after the question, and how material is presented, print size, contrast, spacing, and how much appears at once, changes what the student is able to read and do. The family is seeking an educator who can provide access to age-appropriate, grade-level concepts through carefully adapted instruction, meeting the student at their current access point while maintaining meaningful expectations for growth.
Academic priorities this year include grade-level content across core subjects at the student's access point, structured literacy work on vowels and multisyllabic decoding taught inside that content, foundational mathematics targets, and executive function taught directly as its own area of instruction rather than as whatever is left over at the end of a lesson.
Strong relationships matter in this placement. The student responds especially well to educators who are warm and encouraging, communicate clearly, remain steady through moments of frustration, and demonstrate genuine confidence in the student's ability to learn. Clear expectations, real wait time, and work the student finishes without help are what produce the best days.
What You'll Do
Take day-to-day ownership of a personalized academic program across core subject areas.
Adapt grade-level concepts, curriculum, and materials to create accessible, age-appropriate…