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First-Time Instructional Leader is the first path, planned for January 2027. Instructional Design is planned alongside it. More paths are added as interest grows, and waitlist answers help decide which.

NextGround helps you figure out where you want to go next, and prepare to get there.

Explore career possibilities within education, education-adjacent, and beyond education. When you find a destination that interests you, NextGround helps you understand the role, build the skills it requires, learn from people who’ve done the work, practice, and prepare for the transition.

You choose the destination. We help you prepare for the journey.

No.

Leaving the classroom is one possible destination. So is becoming an instructional coach, moving into curriculum, pursuing school or district leadership, working for an education company, or exploring something outside education entirely.

NextGround isn’t built to push educators out of education. It’s built around career mobility. Sometimes the right next move is deeper into education. Sometimes it’s alongside education. Sometimes it’s somewhere completely new.

Perfect. That’s part of the reason NextGround exists.

Education has far more career possibilities than most people encounter in their day-to-day work.

Depending on the paths available, you might explore destinations in instructional coaching, curriculum, professional learning, school leadership, district leadership, student support, assessment, operations, teacher development, and more.

You don’t have to leave education to make a move.

That’s okay. You don’t need to arrive with a destination.

Start by exploring. NextGround is designed to help you see different roles, understand what people in those roles actually do, and learn what skills and experiences matter.

You may discover something you’ve never considered. And finding out “that’s definitely not for me” is useful information too.

The goal isn’t to tell you what you should become. It’s to help you understand your options well enough to choose for yourself.

Pricing is still being set.

We are not publishing a price yet. Waitlist members will hear the pricing first, along with any early or sponsored seats we are able to offer.

Plan for at least 2 hours per week.

Each cohort is led by a practitioner who has done the work. You join live calls twice a month with guest speakers like district leaders and hiring managers, watch short videos you can finish on a busy day, connect with educators from other districts, and build a portfolio month by month. Support continues through your first 90 days in the new role.

Some weeks will be lighter. Weeks with practice clinics or cohort conversations will ask more of you.

The first NextGround cohort, First-Time Instructional Leader, is planned for January 2027.

“Planned for” is deliberate. We’re building carefully, and we won’t promise a specific day before we’re confident in it.

Waitlist members hear about progress, additional destinations, and future ways to participate first.

Early access is limited and invitation-based while we test the experience with a small group of educators. There is no open sign-up for it.

Joining the waitlist is how you’re considered, it’s where we look first when we open additional spots.

A destination is a role. A path is how you prepare for it.

Destination, the role you could move toward, like Instructional Coach or Curriculum Designer.

Path, the NextGround preparation journey built for that destination: understanding the role, building the skills, practicing, and preparing to pursue it.

Stop, an individual stage inside a path.

Many destinations exist. Not every destination has a NextGround path yet. First-Time Instructional Leader is the first path we’re building, and Instructional Design is next.

NextGround is not a certification program, and completing a path does not guarantee you a new job.

It isn’t a job board, a placement service, a recruiter, a degree program, or a resume factory. It isn’t generic professional development, and it isn’t a course library you have to sort through on your own.

What it does: helps educators understand the role, practice what the work requires, learn from people who have done it, and enter the hiring process better prepared.

Once you choose a destination, NextGround becomes focused on helping you prepare for that role. Think of it like a route:

Different destinations require different preparation, so paths aren’t one-size-fits-all.

Those platforms can be great places to learn something. NextGround starts somewhere different: where are you trying to go?

Instead of searching through thousands of courses and deciding what might be relevant, NextGround organizes the experience around the role you’re preparing for, learning, practitioner insight, practice, feedback, cohort experiences, transition support, and carefully selected outside resources.

The destination comes first. The content supports the destination.

People who understand the work.

NextGround is designed to bring practitioners into the experience, people with real experience in the roles you’re exploring and preparing for. They can help you understand what a job description can’t: what the work actually feels like, the language people in the role use, the situations you’ll encounter, what they wish they’d known, and what helped them make the transition.

Founder + Practitioner

Devin Lewis

Founder of NextGround

ParaprofessionalTeacherInstructional CoachEdTechDistrict Director

“Nobody taught me how to navigate those turns. NextGround is the mentor I never had.”

See his full profile

Devin Lewis, who founded NextGround, is one of those practitioners, eleven years in education, from a Title I sixth-grade classroom in Houston to coaching and ed tech.

You don’t have to prepare for what’s next by yourself.

Cohorts bring together people working toward the same destination. If you’re preparing for your first instructional leadership role, you could learn alongside other professionals preparing for the same role, asking questions, practicing together, comparing experiences, and building community around the journey.

Practice is a major part of what makes NextGround different.

Learning about a difficult conversation isn’t the same as having one. Watching someone facilitate isn’t the same as facilitating. Knowing what good coaching sounds like isn’t the same as trying to coach someone yourself.

NextGround is being designed around opportunities to do something with what you’re learning, realistic scenarios, practice activities, clinics, facilitated experiences, and feedback.

The goal is readiness.

Depending on your path and the experience you choose, NextGround is designed to help you leave with:

No, and we don’t want to pretend otherwise.

Employers make their own hiring decisions, and many factors affect whether someone gets an opportunity. NextGround’s job is to help you become better prepared to pursue one.

We focus on what you can control: understanding the role, building relevant skills, practicing, learning how to communicate your experience, and preparing for the transition.

We prepare you for the opportunity. We don’t promise the opportunity.

That’s part of the idea.

Educators build real skills in communication, facilitation, planning, data use, relationship management, problem-solving, project execution, and leadership. But another industry may describe those skills very differently.

NextGround is designed to help you understand the language and expectations of your destination, recognize where your existing experience genuinely connects, and identify what you still need to build.

The goal isn’t to simply rename everything you did as a teacher. It’s to help you understand the new environment well enough to communicate your experience honestly and effectively.

Getting ready for the role includes getting ready to pursue it.

Depending on the path and offering, that support may include:

But NextGround isn’t designed to be a resume-writing service. The goal is to build the readiness first, then communicate it effectively.

Because getting the job shouldn’t be the first time you seriously think about how to do it.

Imagine becoming an instructional coach after years of teaching. Suddenly you’re coaching adults, facilitating professional learning, navigating resistance, giving feedback, building credibility, using data differently, and managing relationships across a school.

Those are things you can begin understanding and practicing before your first day.

We’re building NextGround thoughtfully, and we’re not announcing a launch date before we’re confident we’re ready.

Right now, we’re learning from educators, developing paths, testing ideas, and building the experience.

If this sounds like something you’d want to use, we’d love to keep you in the loop, what we’re building, new paths, research, and future ways to participate.