Renée Boey - Our Team

Renée Boey

Founder and Head of School

Renée Boey loves to teach and she loves to learn. She caught the teaching bug as a college student when she taught at a Boston public high school for the Harvard Project for International Education and served as the Director of the Phillips Brooks House Citizenship Program that offered naturalization assistance to immigrants. These experiences made her see the life-changing impact education can make within and beyond the classroom. Education has long since become a profession and a passion for her.

Renée’s teaching approach has been shaped by her exposure to a variety of school systems and cultures. She enjoyed her experiences at both local and international schools growing up in Hong Kong and completed her high school education at St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H. The deeply formative years at St. Paul’s gave Renée the liberty to nurture her interest in many subjects and extracurricular activities as well as the opportunity to learn from a diverse community of peers and teachers. The school’s emphasis on the arts and humanities as well as service instilled in Renée a vital appreciation for creativity, thinking from multiple perspectives along with a desire to lead a meaningful life. These values underpin the mission of Baker & Bloom.

After graduating from Harvard College as an English major with a language citation in Japanese, Renée obtained an M. Phil in Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University. She returned to Hong Kong, completed a teaching internship at St. Paul’s Co-Educational College and received her Postgraduate Diploma in Education at the University of Hong Kong. Since then, she has coupled her passion for literature and education as a creative writing teacher, an educational consultant for schools such as St. Stephen’s College, a board member of the HKMA David Li Kwok Po College, and most rewardingly, as an IB English and Humanities teacher at The ISF Academy. She stays connected to her US boarding school, St. Paul's School as a form agent. She served as a Board Director of the Harvard Club of Hong Kong for the past six years and was the Co-Chair of the Harvard Book Prize Committee for the past four years. She is a director of the Harvard Club of Hong Kong Education Fund.

As a teacher, she has seen how the pressure of tests too often stifles the imagination and how the stress of college admissions saps the pleasure of learning. To address these concerns, Renée and her team have done extensive research, designed original curricula, and pursued professional development to prepare young people to face these challenges with positivity, integrity, and creative confidence.

Renée is excited to be harnessing her experience, skills, and passion to launch Bloom KKCA Academy. It is her fervent hope that Bloom KKCA Academy will offer young people an ideal environment to grow and a community of inspiration and innovation.

OTHER BLOOM MEMBERS

Joyce Cowden

Director of Admissions and Marketing

As someone who brings a balanced outlook to life, Joyce appreciates Bloom’s unique bilingual, global, and holistic approach to education. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in Economics and Management from the University of Oxford. After starting her career as a Management Consultant working with Fortune 500 companies in South East Asia, she was drawn to education and chose to enter the field by working at Battelle for Kids, a US-based non-profit organization that helps education leaders and teachers transform school systems and improve learning outcomes for students. Joyce helped teachers in Hong Kong apply Assessment for Learning strategies to set learning objectives, offer timely feedback and use assessment data to inform instruction in classroom. She worked with over 2,000 teachers and principals from primary, secondary and special education schools in Hong Kong.

Joyce’s passion for working with young people and expanding their opportunities led her to become the Head of University Abroad Programs in EF (Education First). She and her team helped hundreds of students and their families every year from Hong Kong to make decisions about which international pathways were suited for them individually and supported their learning placements overseas.

Joyce later joined Modern Teaching Aids (MTA), a leading Australian educational resource provider, as their sole representative in Hong Kong. Within two years, Joyce helped over 400 local, private and international schools source suitable furniture and resources for their campuses. Joyce worked closely with different principals and curriculum teams to facilitate flexible learning environments and identify educational resources to enable best practices for 21st-century teaching and learning. She then worked for K11 Concepts Limited, a leading conglomerate in Hong Kong, to start an educational resource department with a similar purpose.

Joyce embraces Bloom’s future-centered vision for cultivating positive innovators. She believes Bloom’s creative, bilingual approach is particularly timely for students in this period of rapid change. She hopes to contribute to the community by helping more families learn about Bloom and by adding more like-minded parents who seek sincerity, quality, and innovation in their children’s education.

Outside of work, Joyce loves exercise, travel and sharing her optimistic outlook with her all those around her, including her two-year-old daughter.