Curious by nature. In love with how children learn. Ready to lead one of our two new primary classrooms — lower or upper — and help us build the kind of education the future needs: one where children grow up happy, energetic, self-motivated, and learning at an exceptional pace.
We're an outdoor nature school on a beautiful 5,600-square-meter palm plantation in Cherngtalay, Phuket. Our Waldorf-inspired kindergarten has been running for several years. The primary program has been in pilot for the past year — and we're now expanding it into a full lower-and-upper international primary. We're hiring one teacher to lead each.
We're working on one of the most important questions in our lives: what should we teach children so they grow up happy, successful, capable, and ready for a future none of us can fully see? Almost every parent and teacher we know is asking some version of this question, and with AI reshaping what work even looks like, it's becoming louder.
We believe the answer is much clearer than the conversation suggests.
Decades of research, and the most successful school systems in the world — Finland's, for example — point clearly to one thing: a child pursuing something they've chosen will outwork any child pushed. Intrinsic motivation is the engine of real learning.
The major institutions studying this question — the OECD, the WHO, Harvard's Center on the Developing Child, the World Economic Forum — converge on the same short list of human qualities that turn out to predict thriving lives far better than grades:
Take our daughter Rey. We didn't teach her to read until she was six, when she came to us asking — heavily — because a younger friend of hers was already reading and talking constantly about her favourite books. We searched for the best way to teach her, and the most effective material we found was a small phonics program made by a homeschooling mother — videos and exercises, intuitive, visceral, five minutes a day. Rey asked for those five minutes every morning and every evening. Within a couple of months, she was reading basic books. She started first grade, kept going, and two years later — in third grade — she reads at fifth- to seventh-grade level, fun books and science books alike. The whole thing started because she asked.
Once the reading was there, more followed. Rey came across a science book about amber — the fossilised resin of trees — and got fascinated. She started searching for it across the plantation, studying the trees it comes from. A couple of her friends got drawn in by her fascination, and together they started an "Amber Club." They studied every tree around the campus, kept journals, made observations almost scientific. Reading flowed into writing, into science, into working together. The human qualities and the academics, both being practiced every day, in something they had built themselves.
The more children develop these human qualities, the more intrinsic motivation can do the work. That's true for Rey. It's true for every child. And it's what we've built Bamboo Valley to do.
5,600 square meters of palm plantation. Outdoor classrooms under the trees. Indoor rooms with air conditioning for the hottest hours. The whole campus is set up as a kids' version of an adult playground — a mud kitchen, a science corner, a library, workshops, areas where a child can start a real project and stay with it for hours. The connection to nature supports their emotional regulation, their physical health, their attention.
This is what we believe is the future of education. And it's what we're building Bamboo Valley around.
We're hiring you to bring this to the next level. We have the environment. We have the daily mix. Here's what the next level means:
Expanding the sparks across the campus. Setting up new workshops, a fuller science lab, a gardening section — wherever you see the biggest opportunities for children to get excited and start real learning projects.
Building the curriculum for the human qualities themselves. Some schools have started teaching these — usually as one class per week. We want them to be much more central: daily structured lessons, plus a deliberate weaving into the child-initiated learning happening across the campus. Two parts of the work — developing the daily curriculum itself, and finding the right ways to integrate it with the projects children are already running on their own.
Weaving it all together with the academics. We'll continue to have direct instruction classes for math, literacy, and other subjects. The opportunity is figuring out what can be moved out: into the sparks around the campus, into the children's own projects. Where does bread baking teach fractions? Planting and gardening, geometry? When a child's project naturally pulls writing or science in, how do we make sure the academics really land? Finding these overlaps is much of the daily craft.
Doing this well takes a particular kind of teacher. Six things matter most.
High power, high energy. Children feel a teacher before they hear them. In a free-environment school, every adult's energy ripples through the room.
You believe children have unimaginable potential. Not as a hopeful posture but as a working conviction. The model only works if you operate from it every day.
You actively look for ways to bring it out. Your default mode is scanning — what would unlock this child, what would get that group going, what would the science corner need to come alive. Building this kind of school is a curator's job before it's a teacher's.
You want to help build the model. Most of this is still informal at this point. Building it properly with us is half the job.
Outdoors energizes you. The plantation is most of your day, year-round. If being outside drains you, this work will too.
You find the right balance across the mix. Workshops, structured classes, direct teaching, focused practice — knowing when to facilitate, when to teach, when to let children run. The integration is the magic.
This won't fit if any of these ring true:
We read every application personally. Tell us a little about yourself, and we'll get back to you soon.
Thanks — we'll read this personally and get back to you soon.
