James Smith Email & Phone Number

James is a passionate, forward-thinking, experienced senior leader who thrives on the challenge of leading change and developing learning communities. He achieves improvement by creating a culture of evidence-informed practice around the needs of students. He leads through a people-oriented, collaborative approach and a clear vision for student learning that emphasises the breadth of human capability.He is currently the Principal of Discovery College, Hong Kong, leading across both the Primary and Secondary sections. His leadership has involved work on the introduction of the IB Career-related Programme, achieving greater leadership coherence across the College, and developing innovative professional learning models. He and other DC colleagues are currently working on developing new approaches to Quality Assurance and Reputation Management.While at King George V School James led the development of the Middle School Curriculum, a bespoke curriculum framework built around the IBO’s ‘Approaches to Learning’. It aimed to empower students in developing a broad set of transferable capabilities within the context of a set of coherently-designed interdisciplinary learning experiences. James is an experienced international educator, having worked in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom and in a variety of leadership roles. He has a background in Learning Technologies and offers significant expertise in Assessment & Reporting and Learning Management Systems (LMS) Development. His doctoral research focussed on the washback effects of assessment in the IB Middle Years Programme (MYP).