Overview
Kindergarten Teacher, Alpha – $120,000/year USD Jobs in Santa Monica, CA at Crossover
Title: Kindergarten Teacher, Alpha – $120,000/year USD
Company: Crossover
Location: Santa Monica, CA
- $120,000 annual W2 salary with weekly pay; health, dental, and vision coverage starting day one
- On-site role at an Alpha campus across 13 U.S. locations in CA, CT, FL, IL, and MA (complete list provided below; relocation assistance available)
An AI system can teach reading to a six-year-old. It cannot make that child care. Closing that gap is your responsibility.
Alpha students in grades K-2 complete their academic work through AI-driven applications over two daily hours. No traditional lectures. No paper worksheets. You will spend half your day facilitating one-hour life-skills workshops focused on public speaking, concentration, and feedback exchange. A structured playbook guides you, but the most effective Guides customize it for their cohort and create new activities where gaps appear. The remaining half of your day is devoted to individual and small-group sessions, where you analyze Coachbot data and coach each student toward 100% completion of weekly app targets. Warmth builds trust that allows you to push. Pushing demonstrates your belief in their capacity.
Success in a quarter means every student completes their weekly app goals, passes the Test2Pass for every life-skills workshop, and 90%+ report that they love you. Falling short on any of these three metrics means missing the mark. Your first year is about mastering the playbook; once you demonstrate consistent execution, the path to Lead Guide opens, where you mentor new hires while continuing to lead your own cohort.
If you are drawn to conventional teaching methods, prefer ready-made curricula with no room for adaptation, or see warmth and rigor as incompatible, this role is not for you. If your background includes early-elementary teaching with a focus on circle time, camp counseling for young children, youth sports coaching, or children's theater performance, the final step before receiving an offer is a shadow day coaching actual Alpha students. Submit your application today.
What You Will Be Doing
- Facilitating one-hour life-skills workshops for K-2 cohorts on topics including public speaking, focus, feedback, and other enduring competencies, personalizing the playbook to fit your cohort rather than delivering it verbatim.
- Conducting daily individual and small-group coaching sessions that maintain every student's progress toward weekly app targets, leveraging Coachbot analytics, Alpha's motivational tools (school currency, leaderboards), and the personal rapport you have established with each child.
- Delivering the Test2Pass, Alpha's mastery-based evaluation, for each life skill, and supporting students who do not initially pass until mastery is achieved.
- Engaging kindergarteners through songs, storytelling, physical activity, and playfulness while maintaining real, quantifiable expectations for first and second graders.
- Serving as the warm, encouraging adult children are excited to see at morning drop-off AND the adult who will not allow them to settle for less than their potential.
What You Won’t Be Doing
- Delivering whiteboard lectures. Academic content is embedded in the applications, not delivered by you.
- Creating curriculum materials from the ground up. Alpha supplies the playbook; you animate it.
- Passively monitoring children on computers. Motivation in this role is active, individualized, and consistent.
- Reducing a weekly target so a student can meet it more easily. When a student falls behind, the solution is coaching the student, not adjusting the goal.
- Grading assignments, preparing for standardized tests, or handling parent outreach. Campus Leads manage parent communication, and the other tasks are not part of this model.
Kindergarten Teacher Key Responsibilities
Ensure that every student in your K-2 cohort completes their weekly learning targets, achieves mastery in each life skill, and finishes the year reporting that they loved you.
Basic Requirements
- Willing to work on-site at an Alpha campus in La Jolla (San Diego), Lake Forest (Orange County), Palo Alto, Piedmont, San Francisco, Santa Monica, or South Bay (LA), CA; Greenwich, CT; Boca Raton, Miami, or Miami Beach, FL; Chicago, IL; or Boston, MA (relocation assistance provided).
- Bachelor's degree in any field.
- At least 3 years of direct experience working with children ages 4 to 7 (such as early-elementary teaching, coaching, tutoring, camp counseling, or youth program leadership).
- A concrete example you can articulate of motivating a young child toward a challenging goal: the nature of the goal, your approach, and the result.
- Willingness to allow AI to deliver instructional content while you concentrate on motivation and life-skills development.
- Willingness to maintain high expectations for students even when met with resistance.
- Legally authorized to work in the United States without requiring visa sponsorship.
Nice-to-have Requirements
- Background in youth sports coaching, children's theater, camp leadership, Montessori/progressive early childhood education, or after-school programs where you held direct responsibility for motivating young children toward defined objectives.
- History of personal high achievement (academic, athletic, or professional) that makes holding others to demanding standards a natural practice, not an adopted stance.
- Performer's instinct with young children: the capacity to captivate a room of kindergarteners using voice, humor, and physical expression.
- Demonstrated success in transforming hesitant or resistant young children into confident, engaged participants.
About Alpha
Want to join a learning rebellion that’s transforming the traditional classroom?
Alpha School is on a mission to reshape education with a bold approach that harnesses AI to accelerate learning and unleash student potential.
They don’t play by the old rules.
Alpha is creating a new paradigm where students master core academics in just two hours a day, freeing up time for hands-on, passion-driven learning that truly prepares them for the real world.
Alpha School is rewriting the rules of education.
Sounds too good to be true? It’s not.
There is so much to cover for this exciting role, and space here is limited. Hit the Apply button if you found this interesting and want to learn more. We look forward to meeting you!
Working with us
This is a full-time (40 hours per week), long-term position. The position is immediately available and requires entering into an independent contractor agreement with Crossover as a Contractor of Record. The compensation level for this role is $60 USD/hour, which equates to $120,000 USD/year assuming 40 hours per week and 50 weeks per year. The payment period is weekly. Consult www.crossover.com/help-and-faqs for more details on this topic.
Crossover Job Code: LJ-5634-US-SantaMon-KindergartenTe.008
