In this episode of the LearnIt Podcast, we sit down with Giles Pinto, Middle and Upper Loop Leader at VERSO International School in Bangkok. From growing up as a third culture kid in international schools to coaching middle school basketball in Japan to leading secondary education at one of Southeast Asia's most innovative schools, Giles shares what it really means to design learning around the learner, not the lesson plan.

In this conversation, Giles shares:

• The coaching model over content delivery: Why the best educators de-center themselves from the classroom, create space for student voice, and understand that effective teaching looks more like facilitation than lecturing.
• Human skills, not soft skills: How emotional intelligence, resilience, and critical thinking aren't extras to be developed after academics, they're the core competencies AI will never replace, and we're actively undermining them by pretending they're secondary.
• Personalized learning in practice: What it looks like when a school serves high performance athletes, neurodiverse learners, and aspiring music producers in the same building, and why traditional models can't accommodate that kind of individual growth.
• The paraphrasing paradox: Why a skill as simple as putting something in your own words reveals everything about whether students are thinking critically or outsourcing their cognition to ChatGPT, and how educators need to address this head on instead of pretending AI doesn't exist.

This episode is for every educator exhausted by one size fits all approaches, every parent who knows their child needs something different, and every leader willing to admit that what worked for decades might not work tomorrow. It will remind you that when we stop centering systems and start centering humans, education becomes something worth protecting.

Music by: https://www.bensound.com/free-music-for-videos
License code: WOGHTAW7UC5DW7QG
Artist: Benjamin Tissot