Lower School teacher

Thomas MacLaren School, a charter public school located centrally in beautiful Colorado Springs, Colorado, is accepting applications for founding Lower School teachers in grades K through 5.

MacLaren is an award-winning liberal arts school that has built a culture of wonder and rigor in grades 6 through 12. Led by a faculty of thinkers, musicians, mathematicians, writers, and scientists who constitute a true community of learners, our students follow a common curriculum in the arts, humanities, mathematics, and the sciences, with no tracking. These students have excelled both academically and artistically—setting, for example, the Colorado state record on the composite ACT, and winning honors at the statewide orchestra competition. More importantly, they have done so in a warm, humane environment that seeks to give the very best education to every student who walks through our doors, regardless of race, gender, or family income.

Now that have our own 18-acre campus and have won a federal expansion grant worth three-quarters of a million dollars, we are opening the elementary grades, and we seek to hire a dynamic and engaging group of lifelong learners to join us in this work. Founding Lower School teachers will enter into a community that deeply values collegiality, conversation, and delight in learning. At MacLaren, we believe that all human beings—and thus even the youngest children—can know truth, create beauty, and practice goodness. We seek teachers who recognize the inherent dignity and specialness of childhood, and who are able to lead students in a culture of rigor and wonder.

Lower School classroom teachers will learn a meaty and rewarding curriculum based on the Core Knowledge Sequence. Distinctive features include Singapore math, reading novels and stories and poems of genuine literary merit, and an end-of-day period called Leisure, in which students might draw or work a puzzle or knit or practice handwriting while listening to a story read aloud. Moreover, all students will have daily Kodály-concept music and daily P.E. (these latter taught by music and P.E. teachers, not by classroom teachers), and all students will play outside on a playground designed to appeal to the senses. Lower School teachers will enjoy working with young people in an atmosphere of kindness and courtesy, and will love to lead students in our pedagogy of learning for its own sake, not for a grade. At MacLaren, we don’t teach to the test—we teach.

In our experience, there is no single pathway for great teachers to follow on their way to MacLaren. Excellent teachers have come to us as chemists, homemakers, retired fighter pilots, and newly-minted college graduates. As a charter school, we are exempt from teacher-licensure requirements; our teachers need only be Qualified under the Every Student Succeeds Act (described here: https://www.cde.state.co.us/fedprograms/tii/a_hqt. Far more significant to us are curiosity, energy, intellectual humility, a strong work ethic, and an ability to build relationships with young people. A diverse pool of applicants is encouraged to apply. Spanish speakers are particularly welcome.

Finally, Colorado Springs lands on just about every Top 10 Places to Live list for good reason: it’s gorgeous and affordable, with terrific weather and ready access to mountains, breweries, and the Garden of the Gods.

Great prospective MacLaren teachers, please visit http://www.maclarenschool.org/about_us/employment/