Instructional Designer · Houston, TX

I design for the readers everyone else gave up on.

Ten years teaching secondary students — four of them running dyslexia intervention for kids who had already stopped trying. Now I build the courses. Backward from the outcome, in short iterative cycles, revised by what the learner data actually says.

See four live products ↓ Download résumé ↗
M.Ed., Learning Design & TechnologyUniversity of Maryland Global Campus · Expected May 2027
Texas CertifiedSpecial Ed 7–12 · Social Studies 7–12 · Generalist 4–8
Structured LiteracyOrton-Gillingham · Science of Reading · Dyslexia Specialist
Selected work

Four products. All live. All mine.

Every link below opens something you can actually use — not a screenshot, not a slide about a project. Click any of them.

Professional development · Minicourse
● Live

Decoding the Code

A self-paced course teaching the six components of structured literacy to Grades 6–12 content-area teachers — the science, biology, and history teachers who can see a student struggling but cannot name what broke. Six measurable outcomes, three learner tracks, built as a full design portfolio.

Understanding by DesignSAMLearner personasScenario-based
What it shows: I can take a technical body of knowledge, work backward to what counts as evidence of learning, and design three differentiated paths to it — then defend every decision in writing.
Read the case study →
Interactive e-learning · Assessment
● Live

Escape the 6

A mastery-gated escape room. Teachers read real student evidence — a misread word, a glossary entry, a stalled sentence — and name which component of reading broke down. Six locks, six components. A wrong answer returns a guided hint instead of a score, so nobody shuts down.

Mastery gatesUDL 7.3Learner telemetryVanilla JS
What it shows: I instrument my own work. Every wrong lock, hint, and abandoned run is logged and read against decision rules — first-try rate under 50% means my teaching was thin, not that the learner failed. The activity tells me what to rebuild.
Play the activity →
K–12 platform · Intervention
● Live

Sankofa Speech Lab

A speech intervention platform for K–12 learners, with progress tracking, text-to-speech feedback, and a printable certificate at the end. Built for the kid who needs the practice and the adult who needs the record.

Progress trackingText-to-speechAccessibility
What it shows: I ship whole products, not artifacts — including the unglamorous parts, like a help route and a certificate a parent can put on a fridge.
Open the platform ↗
Workforce training · Community
● Live

Waste to Wealth

Five-module training on plastic upcycling for community collectors, with 15 scenario-based mastery checks. Module 2 covers PVC hazards and is gated at 3/3 — you do not pass a safety module by guessing.

Scenario-basedSafety-critical gatingLow-bandwidth
What it shows: I design for the actual context. This course had to work for learners with no LMS, low bandwidth, and real physical risk if the training failed. The gate is set where the danger is.
Open the course ↗
How I work

Two models, doing two different jobs

Most model arguments are a category error. "What counts as success" and "how do I get there" are different questions, so they get different answers.

The spine · what gets learned

Understanding by Design

Outcomes and evidence get fixed first, backward from what a learner must actually be able to do. This part does not move. A syllable rule is either correct or it is not, and a shaky version handed to a teacher gets carried into a classroom the next morning.

The engine · how it gets built

Successive Approximation

Everything else is built in short evaluate–design–develop cycles with real people reacting to rough versions. Version one is meant to be thrown away. That is not failure — it is the cheapest possible way to find out you were wrong.

The failure I design against: scope drift by prototype. An activity is fun, everyone likes it, and it quietly starts assessing something easier than the outcome required. Nobody decides to do this — it happens one reasonable cycle at a time. So every cycle closes with one question: does this still produce the evidence the outcome requires? If not, the activity is wrong — not the outcome.

About

The teacher behind the designs

Sankofa bird — Sankofa Learning Design

I spent a decade in Texas classrooms — Spring ISD, Fort Bend ISD, Alvin ISD — and the last stretch of it doing dyslexia intervention with secondary students. Teenagers who had been failing at reading for eight years and had built an entire personality around not caring.

What I learned there is the thing I now design around: the adults could see the struggle but could not name it. A science teacher knows a student is drowning in the lab handout. They do not know whether it is phonology, morphology, or syntax — so they cannot help. That gap is what every course I build is aimed at.

I work under Sankofa Learning Design. The Sankofa bird looks backward while moving forward: it is not wrong to go back for what you forgot. That is a fair description of remediation, and a fair description of iterative design.

I am finishing an M.Ed. in Learning Design & Technology at UMGC and looking for an instructional design role — K–12, higher ed, or corporate. I write my own code, run my own data, and would rather be told a prototype is wrong than find out later.

Contact

Hiring for an instructional design role?

I am actively looking. If you have a course that is not landing, or a body of knowledge nobody can teach quickly enough, that is exactly the problem I like.

✉ tennehfreeman.works@gmail.com Download résumé ↗ LinkedIn ↗

Houston, TX · 713-997-0193 · Open to remote.