Upper School Maker, Design, & Engineering Instructor

Established in 1972, Mount Vernon School serves over 1,250 students in Preschool through Grade 12 on our 40-acre Atlanta campus. Grounded in Christian values, Mount Vernon prepares all students to be college-ready, globally competitive, and engaged citizen leaders. Mount Vernon School anchors the Mount Vernon Organization as a destination of inquiry, innovation, and impact. Through MVSO, the online division of our Upper School, and MV Ventures, our research and educational consultancy, our organization is living its mission to design a better world by providing unique and differentiated value for all community members now and into the future.

The Team 

The Upper School Faculty is a collaborative and forward-thinking community of education professionals who are consistently looking for ways to create real-world, project-based experiences that help their students connect content in a relevant and impactful way. This team models what it means to be inquisitive, nurturing, flexible, and creative. While they customize and personalize the learning for each course, this team is united in using an inquiry-based model and a mastery approach to teaching.

The Program

Since 2014, Mount Vernon has been investing in the Maker, Design, Engineering Program, which has become a hallmark of the school and an integral partner to the design thinking and project-based learning pedagogies we employ in Preschool through Grade 12. With 4 dedicated maker labs and many auxiliary maker spaces, the school boasts state-of-the-art equipment and production space where students can craft and fabricate ideas that can become solutions today. Influenced by books such as Make Space and programs such as the Standford.d School, Mount Vernon has been pioneering maker education for more than a decade and recently published Leveling Up Maker Education in collaboration with Mount Vernon Ventures.

The Role

This position has the opportunity to develop and deliver a wide variety of maker courses to students in Grades 9-12. This role is important because Mount Vernon believes each student needs a foundation in Maker, Design, and Engineering approaches,  and these skills are critical to student success in other academic courses as they design and prototype for projects outside of maker-specific courses. Strong candidates will have experience teaching Maker, Design, and/or Engineering courses, be a practitioner of Design Thinking, Inquiry-Based Learning, and Competency-Based Education, and be an active participant in the maker education community.

What Strong Candidates Look Like

Ideal candidates will be passionate lifelong makers, curious learners, and student champions. You might fabricate furniture on weekends, iterate prints until the tolerance is right, solder your own boards, write code that runs something in your house, or have spent years in a shop, studio, or engineering firm before you found your way to a classroom. A job, a side business, or a weekend obsession - all the same to us. What matters is that you are a practitioner who walks the walk and can inspire students to do the same.

Responsibilities 

• Facilitating hands-on, project-based learning experiences with several groups of 12 to 20 students and supporting students at seasonal after-school events
• Connecting project-based learning experiences to real world community impact
• Designing, iterating, and delivering unit development and alignment across a variety of maker courses in collaboration with the MADE, Inquiry, Impact, and  Innovation Diploma teams.
• Collaborating with Lower School and Middle School Maker teachers to build cohesive and vertically aligned curriculum and learning experiences.
• Maintaining comprehensive records of performance, progress, and goals using Mount Vernon tools
• Communicating with families, learning coaches, and outside providers
• Operating as a test kitchen for our newest, boldest ideas for doing school differently
• Maintaining the Upper School Maker Spaces, equipment, and inventory
• Partnering with Upper School teachers to help integrate MDE and fabricate/showcase student work
• Curating two moments a year for students to exhibit their work
• Actively participating in professional growth opportunities, including weekly school/division/team meetings

Core Competencies

• Knowledge of maker, design, and engineering content, technological tools, and platforms
• Culturally proficient & equity literate
• Experience engaging students in learning to promote learner agency and ownership and using questioning/discussion techniques
• A track record of giving high-quality, responsive feedback
• Understanding of competency-based assessment/mastery approach to learning
• Knowledge of inquiry-based learning pedagogies and design thinking
• Use technology in service of learning (experience with coding, 3D modeling, robotics, circuitry and programming, digital media, engineering, design, and fabrication)
• Maintaining purposeful environments that support student agency