Personalization is at the heart of the BCIS experience! We are therefore excited and honored to be hosting the world’s leading expert on personalizable education, Professor Yong Zhao. Professor Zhao is spending a week at BCIS, sharing his professional expertise with BCIS school leaders and faculty, inspiring our students and sharing insights with our parents to help us further develop in this strategic area.


In his bestselling book, “Reach for Greatness: Personalizable Education for all Children”, Professor Zhao explains that all children can be great in their unique ways and thus personalizable education focuses on enhancing strengths instead of fixing deficits. He states, “Letting students take control of their learning requires an education that is personalizable BY students, not prepersonalized FOR students. A personalizable education is carefully designed to encourage and enable students to create their own personal educational experiences so as to explore, experiment with, and enhance their passions and strengths.”

However, Professor Zhao cautions that making education personalizable does not mean letting students do whatever they like whenever they like. Rather, personalizable education needs to be carefully designed and thoughtfully implemented. Professor Zhao explains that high-quality personalizable education should include four defining features: AGENCY, SHARED OWNERSHIP, FLEXIBILITY, and VALUE CREATION.

We invited two of our high-school students, Anna and Helen to share their understanding of these key features based on their experiences at BCIS.

AGENCY 

Professor Zhao: “In order for students to explore, identify, and enhance their strengths and follow their passions, they must become the owners of their learning. They must have agency in designing their own learning, or they must take control of their own learning. The higher the percentage of time students can control, the more personalizable the education is. The more personalizable the education, the more likely it is that students can develop their passions and strengths and become great.”

BCIS already offers some degree of personalization for students from Early Childhood Center (ECC) through Elementary School (ES) and Secondary School (SS), for example in student choice of projects or ways of presenting their learning, and in student-led Enrichment Activities (EAs). Personalization, agency and autonomy are fundamental features of BCIS IDEATE program for Grades 11-12 students. 

As we expand the scope of personalization at BCIS, this year we launched a new Projects Course for Grade 9 students. Facilitated by IDEATE Coordinator, Ms Barnhardt, the G9 Projects Course is designed to be rigorous and challenging and has been developed BY students FOR students. 

Grade 12 student Helen explains, “The whole point of that course is to teach students project development and the skills you need to succeed at your project. The course equips students with the transferable skills that are needed, like collaboration, time management, learning to use resources, and self-management. And then we teach students how to be a better learner, a more productive learner so that they understand how they can develop these skills on their own and how they can use them to drive their projects forward.” 

Grade 11 student Anna explains the difference between agency and autonomy. “Student agency is about identifying what you can contribute to the community and taking the initiative to act purposefully and do it. Student autonomy is about equipping yourself with the skills, like learning to learn, so that you can become more competent, and you're equipped with what you need to maintain your projects and extend them.”

Helen, passionate about literature and writing, is also a keen scientist and adds “I don't know exactly what I'm interested in. I don't know if I want to go into biology. I don't know if I want to do a project about language. I don't know and I think that's fine. First of all, that honesty, that awareness, the ability to reflect on yourself and know that currently you're not sure where your interests are. I think that's a really important starting point for self-autonomy and self-agency. I want to explore the opportunities around me. I want to find out what my interests are. Then students can join all these projects to learn about themselves and then, slowly, they discover their own interest, and they gain the confidence and the courage to start something on their own. What it's really about it, is the mindset of being self-driven and self-directed. 

SHARED OWNERSHIP 

Professor Zhao: “Shared ownership is a way for students to have agency over their educational experiences by being able to contribute to and take responsibility for the culture, infrastructure, and resources in a school. Moreover, in a shared ownership school, students are not only concerned about their own interests but also the interests of others and the community as a whole. Shared ownership means shared responsibility."

Anna is passionate about science with a deep interest in biology and neuroscience. During the past couple of years, she has been actively involved in leading and collaborating on a range of award-winning circularity projects at school which she describes as “initiatives that all aim to harness natural cycles for the benefit of the community.” These collaborative, student-led initiatives include a rooftop garden, solar-powered greenhouse, composting, hydroponics, aquaponics, recycling spent coffee grounds into skincare products etc - “all of these things basically explore some kind of circular process in nature and then we try to incorporate that into a solution to a local environmental problem.”

Anna has been leading the aquaponics project, which enables her to explore biology in greater depth and apply her understanding to create authentic solutions. “Aquaponics is basically hydroponics with fish so it harnesses the interdependent relationship between fish and vegetables. Imagine a fish tank and then we have a setup on top of it where vegetables can grow, so that the fish produce nutrients for the vegetables through excretion, and the vegetables by absorbing these nutrients help us stabilize the water quality for the fish - it's a mutually beneficial relationship. I've made prototypes in the past, they are quite small to just test out designs and try to grow things. And then with those setups, I've done an experiment to explore nutrient optimization. The quantitative data that I gather are levels of ammonia, nitrites and nitrates and you use a test kit to measure the levels because the thing about these kinds of nutrients in the water is that the relationship is like a parabola. So you reach a threshold where the benefits are maximized. But if you keep adding nutrients, a phenomenon known as nitrification occurs, so things start to die out because you have a nutrient overload. The aim of the experiment was to define the threshold so we can optimize the parameters in the setup. And now I've taken down the prototypes because this year I'm going to do an upgrade.” 

FLEXIBILITY 

Professor Zhao: “In order to maximize room for personalization, a school needs to have maximal flexibility in response to new opportunities, emerging needs, and unexpected problems. Flexibility applies to all aspects of the school: leadership, timetable, curriculum, facilities, students, and staffing. To support the flexibility mindset, a school needs a culture that does not look at change as bad, poor planning, or a waste of time. The leadership and adults should view change as normal and expected. After all, learning is about change; it is about discovering passions and strengths.”

Last semester, before the summer break, Anna proposed an extension to her aquaponics project to BCIS Head of School and to members of the school board. Her proposal was approved.

“So now I'm working on making an upgraded setup. It's going to be a real setup that actually generates outcomes. We can use it as a sustainable food source for the school community because that's primarily the purpose of aquaponics, but we can also extend it into an educational opportunity. I'll be inviting more students who are interested in biology, chemistry, design, physics to help with the maintenance of the setup and see what else we could do with it. How can we keep extending this project? The head of the science department, reached out to me and she wants to incorporate a plant farm into the setup. Because the science department, in biology class, does photosynthesis experiments and they need to observe plants. They've been buying the plants, and it's unsustainable because they come with plastic wrappers and it consumes a lot of materials. If we can start farming the plants directly from our setup, then we can just take them whenever we need and we're not damaging the environment. Because the setup is a sustainable source, if we can run it properly then you can always take from it and it's more sustainable than having to buy things because it saves plastic and it saves money. After the experiment we can turn them into compost, so you're not wasting anything during this process.”

 VALUE CREATION

Professor Zhao: “Personalizable learning is not only about supporting students’ pursuit of their passions and strengths through agency, shared ownership, and flexibility, but also about guiding students in turning their passions and strengths into something valuable. By creating something valuable, students find purpose in their learning and put in efforts to enhance their strengths. They don’t just learn from others; they learn for others as well.”

Helen is a leader of the Biodiversity Circularity Project, “We initially thought of building a really aesthetically pleasing immersive learning rooftop garden on the top of the swimming pool. But then we had a meeting with Terry Townshend, a conservationist, and an expert in biodiversity. He said that aesthetics isn’t the most important when you're trying to enhance biodiversity and that's really important for an ecosystem in the urban environment to rebuild itself. I had a team of Grade 8 and Grade 9 students. They were so invested in the aesthetics of the project that it was very hard for them to hear that. So when we changed course it was this idea of maybe not everything we thought was wrong, but this expert gave us this great new idea with a lot of evidence. Can we combine them? Is there a way we can make something that's aesthetically pleasing but is also beneficial for the rewilding of the ecosystem.” 

The International Baccalaureate (IB) recently recognized the value and significance of BCIS’ student-led Biodiversity Circularity Project and awarded the students a grant of US$3000 from the IB Global Youth Action Fund and an 8-week training program on social entrepreneurship. The project also won a US$2000 ACAMIS Service Learning Award. The team of students will manage these funds to help them realize their goal.

Anna highlights another valuable aspect of the circularity projects for BCIS. The students are also trying to find curriculum links so that whatever they make through their projects can be used as teaching materials for classes. They have created a database to draw connections between the projects and the different units in different subject classes. Some of these circularity projects originated from the curriculum, and now students are now trying to connect them back into the curriculum. 

Anna concludes, “I think what drives us primarily to do these kinds of initiatives is we can use our strengths and passions to serve a good greater than ourselves, a cause greater than ourselves and to impact more people so that other people are growing alongside us. Not only do we get to impact other people, but we’re also helping them grow, so we create a circle of people with similar interests and we can all learn from each other. We're helping them develop a mindset at an earlier stage in life. It's the mindset of a global citizen.”

BCIS is committed to providing high quality learning and teaching with personalization at the heart of the experience. We firmly believe that all children can be great in their unique ways. By empowering and inspiring through challenge and compassion, we encourage each and every student to REACH FOR GREATNESS!