Dr. Francis Pang

A building that recently appeared in the embassy area near the Lufthansa Shopping Center in Beijing’s Chaoyang District has aroused the interest of local Beijing residents. It is the newly constructed Capital International School (CIS), sponsored by the Chinese government and the education authority of New Brunswick, Canada. The school, with its advanced international standard teaching methods, offer the best opportunity for an international education in Beijing. Classes start this September.

CIS is the answer for the many foreign nationals and diplomats living and working in Beijing that want to send their children to a good school. It has a Canadian curriculum in classes that range from Montessori kindergarten to senior high school, and also offers an International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) program. CIS graduates take with them certificates from both CIS and the New Brunswick Education Authority, and its IBO program study scores and certificates are also internationally recognized.

CIS provides a congenial environment and advanced teaching facilities that include a computer room, art gallery, library, indoor swimming pool, playing ground, and most notably, intelligent blackboard. The majority of CIS teachers are from Canada.

The intelligent blackboard is installed with over 10,000 teaching software packages and is a teaching tool of inestimable value. In, for example, a music class, the teacher can activate a program that projects a stave on to the blackboard and play all the notes on it. In a geography class, the class is shown images of the universe taken from an astronomical telescope. These methods captivate students’ attention - a sure way of making sure they learn.

The intelligent blackboard is also a teaching management tool as it can be used to supervise the teacher's preparation for lessons as well as their actual classes. When a student leaves CIS to study abroad, his records can be transferred via the blackboard.

Dr. Francis Pang is chairman of the board of directors of CIS. He believes that education is a global cause, and that the globalization of Chinese education starts with teacher training. In the past 25 years, Dr Pang has opened three international schools in China, all of which have forged high reputations. They are:

The Beijing Concord College of Sino-Canada, founded in 1994 under the sponsorship of the Chinese and Canadian governments, and the first international school to open in China; the Shenzhen (Nashan) Concord College of Sino-Canada; and the International School of Sino-Canada in south China.

All three schools combine Chinese and Canadian courses and focus on training students’ innovative and problem solving abilities.

The schools’ internationally linked development path is in direct contrast to traditional Chinese teaching methods that focus purely on passing the college entrance exam. Over the past decade, more than 800 of the schools’ 3,000 graduates have gone on to postgraduate courses at foreign colleges and universities. Many of those in China have gone on to the country’s most prestigious Tsinghua and Peking universities.

The newly founded CIS was built with an investment of RMB 200 million (US$25 million). Dr. Pang sets a high standard, and the latest international educational methods operational at the school ensure that CIS students are equipped and qualified for further education in all parts of the world.