Director of Curriculum Development, Beijing No. 4 High School International Campus

So my name is Mi Ying Ma. I go by Ophelia, and for the past two years, I've been working as the Director of Curriculum Development at Beijing Number Four High School international campus, which is in Beijing, China. So my position supports the academic dean, and most of my responsibility is actually identifying and creating or developing partnerships with new innovative programs that can really support our students. So one of the things that I did when I was there was I created something called the I Project, which is a five week long, student directed sort of independent learning project, and so they were given some time in their schedule, and they can basically choose anything that they're personally passionate about. It's kind of a passion project kind of thing, and we give them kind of three broad categories. We call them I Make, which is to create something tangible, I Research, pretty self-explanatory, and then I Express, which is something more on the artsy side, the personal expression side, and then I Live, which is you can try and start your own company, or you can organize an event, or you can try out a new lifestyle, something of that sort, where you document your learning and your growth, and so that was a pretty big success, and then the school continued to do that, so that's for 11th graders, and then we do a big showcase, where we invited all of the families to come and join us, so it's programs like this that really focus on more 21st century learning, developing creativity and collaboration and communication, these kind of non-cognitive skills to supplement a very rigorous academic program that we're already offering. So yeah. So the other things that I've done is we did a critical reading seminar. We've done kind of some experiments with blended and online learning models to try to expand our elective offerings, and just programs like that.