A Year in Review: Why a Lego Serious Play Strategy Meeting represented a Hopeful Future for Thai Education
An educational adventure begins
A year ago, I set out to make a small change in the Thai education system. I dove in headfirst to become the first-ever Innovation Advisor at VERSO International School, experienced what the transformative experience of hackathons can do for kids as young as 12 (VERSO HACK), started a podcast called Future Ready School to ask some of the most progressive thought leaders in Thailand about, what future-ready education looks like for themselves and for learners, and how parents can prepare, judged a Demo Day for our learners’ Capstone projects, and ended the year not with another boring board meeting with PowerPoint slides, but with a Lego Serious Play workshop for the senior leadership team at VERSO, hosted by our friends at StrengthSiam.
Our Learners demo-ing their projects from the multidisciplinary learning labs.
A familiar sight for anyone who has worked in product and design — our learners documenting their User experience research and design journey!
As the school term dawns to a close and a new year begins, I have been honored to be part of the journey of the success of this institution, humbled by the experience as an outsider looking in and trying to “Move Fast and Break Things” (which obviously doesn’t work in education!), and optimistic about the future of Thai education. Here’s what I’ve learned in the past year:
Giving people the autonomy to lead
At every interaction at VERSO, one of the things that surprises me the most is how easy it was to reach everyone in the school and be reached. I can always talk to any department whether it be Marketing, Admissions, Academic, Partnership and even our Founding Head of School, Mr. Cameron Fox, via chat or email. There are no titles or hierarchy, no layers of red tape to get through, just passionate people trying to get stuff done without the usual academic pomp and circumstance.
What is even more impressive once I was inside the team at VERSO is how much autonomy the team that I worked with had to creatively problem solve for the challenges they were facing at the job. Ideas would flow between me and the heads of marketing, communications and high school and we would just start to develop proposals. Yes we still have to get approval and gather a lot of feedback, but I’ve never imagined that so many of my ideas would actually get a chance to be executed like the podcast, running a school tour like an experiential event or Lego Serious Play. We don’t always get it right the first time, but most of the time, we learned a lot and got valuable feedback on how we can improve in the future iterations. The most important thing though is to embrace everyone’s creative energies and to give people space to channel their best work. This is something I’ve never seen in other schools, and till this day I am surprised by the high level of trust and support that our Board and Founders have in the team!
In my humble opinion the most successful podcast series a school has ever done is to showcase Future-Ready Education ;)
For re-run programs, click on any of the following links:
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8t_-4gzj1W78O7plsrstZg
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/futurereadyschool
- Soundcloud: https://bit.ly/34kDm0d
- Clubhouse: https://bit.ly/3FVx6tw
Humility in receiving feedback
The more time I spent inside the educational sausage factory, the more I realized how tough this business can be. Our Founding Team and Investors could not have imagined launching a school at the hardest possible timing: through COVID and now a global recession. Our Learning Designers a.k.a. teachers, juggle multiple hats to be both a teacher, a coach, a facilitator, and an experience designer, while having to deal with requirements that we need to meet from various institutions that we have to deal with. Our campus grounds are mesmerizing when you visit and we’ve hosted many important parents and delegation, collecting feedback as we walk our parents through an educational journey from graduation to kindergarten in our Future-Ready School tour. We’ve come to realize that while our vision for the school is the kind of fresh perspective that is needed to shake up the status quo in Thailand, there are still many things that our prospective families need time to understand why the VERSO way works and will be the best investment in their children’s education.
A glimpse of the Future-Ready School tour!
Starting with the end in mind as we journey through what a Future-Ready education looks like at the Upper Loop (high school) level.
all the way to Middle Loop (middle school) and Lower Loop (elementary), and finishing off at our playground and pool!
What was most surprising to me about VERSO though is not how we believe we are right and that everyone needs to either believe in our way or the Bang Na Highway, but the way we take comments and feedback. Like a true startup, feedback and criticism is what we seek, not praise. From our talks with parents, we learned that we need to get better telling our story, to be better to explain the VERSO journey and to share why Future-Ready Education is not an “alternative” education but it is the way to make sure our next generation is future-proof to thrive in a brave new world. For example, here’s one way we’ve worked with Khun Nui at Beartai to better explain what makes VERSO unique and different.
Eating our own “Dog Food”
As we receive feedback from our stakeholders with humility, we also seek feedback from our team and internal stakeholders with radical candor and love. So how does a school seek to continuously improve itself without stifling creativity, innovation, and dialogue? That’s where my latest idea, by employing Lego Serious Play with Khun Joe Surathin comes in. At VERSO, what I have come to realize is that people on our team approach our school as not just a duty and a place of work, but a place to continuously work to improve Thailand’s education starting with VERSO as the prime example. We are not here to just make a fancy school and make money, but we are here to make a difference and that means doing things differently, being misunderstood a lot and still always trying to figure how we can do things better.
What I have also come to realize when working on the Lego blocks is that constructing the school’s ecosystem is a way bigger challenge than I thought. To succeed in this future education business, the bar for academic, operational, and marketing success is very high in the current business environment but we also will have to deal with external stakeholders that all need to be looked after carefully. I have come to realize that the formula of lots of money, build it, and they will come, no longer works, but now is the age where educational institutions will live or die by the value they can create to their learners and parents, the core target audience, but to also engage deeply with educators, other schools, the business and tech communities, talent from across the world, and other disruptors like edtech that all need to work hand in hand to make our vision a reality.
There’s so much work to do, everyone is exhausted by the end of the year, but I left the last day of our Lego Serious Play energized. This is because as a team, we remind each other constantly in our meetings of our “why”: Why did we all join VERSO? What are we here to achieve together? What kind of education system do we want to leave Thailand and the world with? That is always our north star, our vision, and our legacy. And that mission continues next term, so see you back in August :)
Special thanks to the incredible love and support from Team VERSO: Khun Cameron Fox for giving me this opportunity of a lifetime, as well as Chester Liang and Charmian Liang from the Management team, Khun Kee, Khun Tinny, Jay, Suzanne, Thomas, Sami, Max and all the incredible Learning Designers who have made my educator life so rich this past year. I’ve learned more about education in such a short period of time, and hoped I made a small dent in the VERSO universe!
