The radical school that thinks it’s just tinkering on the edges

Verso is a new school, a new concept of learning, in Bangkok. Cameron Fox is its Director.

I love the candid interview Verso Director Cameron Fox gave on the recently released GameChanger Podcast. If you’ve got time, listen to the lot — it’s worth it.

The team assembled to create this school includes some of the educators I’ve come to respect the most in a decade of working across international schools, and they went out to find even more learning designer talent to get their ambitions off the ground. But even then, the challenge of creating a genuinely new concept of school with people who’ve proven their success in more conventional international schools is a hard one to overcome:

“We asked: ‘What could we imagine as a new school? We did a really good job. But when we reflected on it, it was still just a school. We couldn’t break away from the conditioning we had as educators.

“We get locked up in curriculum. We get locked up in grades.

We brought together a team of twelve learning designers but I was naive. I expected everyone to be able to do “it”.”

What’s ‘it’? That’s the challenge — ‘it’ needs defined. It’s going to take time to build that definition, that culture, and you maybe need to open up the doors of a school before you can really define and co-design a new version of what you’ve never done.

“You develop the best of intentions and put those best practices [on personalisation] in place… that’s not how it works in real life.

“Our whole education system is fragile. But we’re only tinkering at the edges. We represent a very pioneering model at this scale that will inspire other schools to step away from the safe zone of “this is is how we’ve always done it.”

“There’s nothing radical about our curriculum. But our kids are in mixed age groups and work with a team of learning designers — not one teacher.

“We build towards our kids choosing their pathway. They will know what they want to do and they’ll know who they are. They’ll have the mindset to build their community wherever they are.

“Kids will opt for schools that give them great choice and to explore.”