Our Approach

Our approach to education is to look past labels and standard expectations to attend to the child in front of us, the whole child, full of unique potential.

Our curriculum provides diverse opportunities for social, emotional, and cognitive development and interweaves three core programs: our academic program, our positive education program and our Bloom Innovation Program. We combine an innovative project-based approach with research-based, academically rigorous programs, such as Michael Heggerty’s Phonemic Awareness Curriculum.

We are a bilingual school that cultivates competence and confidence in English and Mandarin through each of these three programs. Our students use both languages in different subjects and develop a world view that is richer, more complex. They will appreciate the expansive heritage of two cultures and be ready to live, work, and learn in both languages in the future.

Academics

Our curriculum design is based not only on research about human development and the most progressive and successful programs in the world, but also with our eyes set on the forefront of traditional fields of knowledge as well as the many new ones emerging. Trigonometry is standard fare, but statistics and data science will likely impact their futures more. Media literacy affects our ability to be good citizens in this era and yet is rarely taught systematically. Curation of knowledge happens thoughtfully at Bloom KKCA Academy and the curriculum is a map we update through conversation with experts as well as students.

We are proactive in engaging each student. You can offer students a world of knowledge, but if they do not connect to it, their learning will remain superficial and soon fade. So we orient our curriculum and teaching approach to maximizing engagement - not teaching to a test or a rubric.

Hands-on learning, drama and debates, Harkness discussions, weekly field trips, games, internships, 3D printing models, multimedia learning, individual choices, problems seen as puzzles, design thinking, school projects as real-world missions – we make learning absorbing and purposeful by putting kids in the driver’s seat.

We engage by caring. Bloom teachers are what make our students’ experience exceptional. Whether they are experienced classroom teachers or specialized faculty like our literacy specialist, STEM expert, forest educator, or Classics teacher, our teachers support, challenge and inspire their students daily. Teachers use norm-referenced assessments and observations to continuously reference developmental continua in order to help every learner on their individual journey. We maintain low student-teacher ratios and offer teachers professional development and frequent collaboration opportunities to attract the best teachers and create a culture of passionate teaching and learning.

We sow the seeds of a lifetime of intellectual curiosity and critical thinking, nurture respect for the past and enthusiasm for the future, and develop the habits of mind and learning capacity that are the hallmarks of an excellent 21st-century education.

Positive Education

The term “positive education” should be redundant. Education should inherently be positive, yet unfortunately, schools often lose sight of the real reason they exist - the students. In our program, wellbeing, the individual, self-awareness, self-expression, and citizenship are part of our DNA so that students, faculty, and staff can flourish.

Daily campfires as well as low student-teacher ratios allow us to check in with one another and focus on the whole child. Our weekly excursions also promote our students’ connection to the city and the planet they live in. This regular interaction with the wider community instills a sense of belonging and provides opportunity for positive values to be translated into caring actions.

Through this explicit and implicit focus on Positive Education, we aim to build on and extend each child’s strengths and create a community of compassionate learners.

Bloom Innovation Program

The volatility and uncertainty of our complex world compels us to prioritize innovation and help our students adapt and bloom.

“Innovation" is far more than adding technology. It’s more than thinking different. We teach innovation as a commitment to see possibilities through to realities, to imagine beyond the status quo and create fresh value and solutions. We teach design thinking to go beyond 21st-century skills of communication and digital literacy to embrace civic literacy, empathy, and risk-taking. The program provides a safe place to fail but also to dream big.

Our integrated project-based learning modules in primary encourage students to gain enduring competences and dispositions and to embrace the open-ended nature of design problems.

As a school, we innovate with purpose - whether it’s about flexible groupings, bicultural learning, how we inspire kids to make a creative impact, or our emphasis on wellbeing and developmentally appropriate pedagogy. What would help our students be resilient and adaptable? What would give teachers autonomy and professional support to innovate? It’s not enough to learn STEM, students need media literacy and moral reasoning to navigate a lifelong relationship with technology.

In the classroom, play, projects, passion, and purpose take center stage - and through them students will master mindsets and competencies that help them grow into compassionate innovators. We take risks, learn from mistakes, and have the discipline to reflect and improve –  together.