About the role: A global organisation building AI-enabled learning and assessment tools for public education systems in the Global South needs a Senior Pedagogy Specialist for a one-year consultancy. You will set the pedagogical foundation for its foundational literacy products. They focus first on public education in Sub-Saharan Africa, including oral reading fluency (ORF) assessment supported by automatic speech recognition (ASR). This is a hands-on design role, with no programme delivery or field operations. You will work with the strategy, product and technology teams to turn evidence on how children learn into skill frameworks, assessment specifications and pathways from diagnosis to remediation.
Responsibilities:
- Literacy frameworks: build evidence-based frameworks for Grades 1–5 covering skills, prerequisites, outcomes and progressions across oral language, phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.
- Include common learner errors and transitions between languages of instruction.
- Assessment specifications: define ORF sub-tasks, task design, scoring rules and benchmarks, and translate EGRA and the Science of Reading into technology-enabled tasks.
- Quality standards: work with the technology team to separate a child’s errors from speech recognition errors, and set review criteria for items, content and AI-generated feedback.
- Learning support: map skill gaps to practice activities, remediation pathways and lesson plans.
- Turn the frameworks into product specifications for progression, scaffolding, feedback, and teacher and caregiver recommendations.
- Contextualisation: align the tools with national curricula alongside education boards, curriculum specialists and language experts.
- Represent the pedagogical approach to funders, government officials and technical partners.
- Delivery and handover: agree priority countries, languages and milestones at the start.
- Deliver editable frameworks, specifications, remediation maps, content-review rubrics and sample materials, then hand over to the internal teams.
Deliverables timeline:
- Months 1–2: review existing tools and evidence, agree the scope, and deliver draft skill frameworks and learning progressions.
- Months 3–9: develop literacy and ORF assessment specifications, scoring rubrics, learner-error taxonomies and remediation maps, with sample tasks and activities.
- Months 6–12: refine through technical and partner reviews, then deliver the final framework package, product guidance, validation roadmap and team handover.
Must-have (expert level):
- Advanced degree in education, learning sciences, curriculum and instruction, educational psychology or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated expertise.
- 10+ years in foundational learning, pedagogy, curriculum or assessment (12+ preferred), with direct ownership of learning frameworks and teaching-learning materials.
- Deep understanding of foundational literacy development (phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, reading fluency, comprehension), with evidence of applying research to instruction and assessment.
- Proven ability to translate EGRA and the Science of Reading into assessment specifications, scoring logic, benchmarks and learning pathways for technology tools.
- Experience designing or adapting frameworks in low-resource public education settings, including multilingual classrooms.
- Able to communicate technical recommendations credibly to senior government stakeholders, funders and education experts, with strong writing skills.
Strong plus:
- Experience in Sub-Saharan Africa, English as a second language, or language-of-instruction transitions.
- Experience with early-grade reading assessments, assessment validation or psychometrics, and digital or AI-enabled education products (for example, ORF assessment using speech recognition).
- Classroom teaching or teacher-training experience, and mentoring content-development teams.
- Fluency in a Sub-Saharan African language relevant to the target countries.
Tools:
- No specific software is required.
- Familiarity with AI-enabled assessment is a plus.
