Daniel Reynolds

Daniel Reynolds is the Head of School at Tokyo International School. With over 20 years of experience as an educator and school leader in Japan, Switzerland and the USA, Daniel’s expertise is highly appreciated, not just in Tokyo but across Japan. As the newly-elected co-chair of the Japanese IB Association, he is helping the country to kick start around 200 new IB schools in the coming years.

Daniel, you have been working in Japan for over 20 years. What has changed since you first arrived in the mid-’90s? 

This is my fourth international school in Japan. One of the biggest changes is the level of collaboration. We used to have a small group of schools in Japan working together and supporting each other. Now we have this incredible collaboration going through the Japan Council of International Schools (JCIS) which consists of 28 member schools. I don’t think we could have gone through the pandemic without the support of this group. We don’t see ourselves as competitors but as partners, so if parents are looking for an IB education they come to us, if they are interested in American or British school models, they can find this in Tokyo as well. There is something here for everyone. Sometimes during school tours, parents are looking for something different. We would then recommend a school from the network and the same would happen to us, we get recommended by other member schools. It’s one of the strongest collaborations I have ever seen. We also plan professional development together, we host events and share our experiences and expertise across the network which is really helpful and strengthens international education in Japan.  

Japan is ‘The Land of Technology’ but how progressive is the education system? How much innovation is actually being used in Japanese classrooms? 

The Japanese education system is very traditional and very exam-based. You have to pass an exam to move from elementary to junior high school and then another from junior high school to high school. The Ministry of Education in Japan is committed to introducing more IB-curricula schools. The goal is to have 200 new IB schools set up in the coming years. As the newly-elected co-chair of the IB Association of Japan, and together with my colleagues from other international schools, we are committed to helping local schools get started. I have been in Japan for some time and have decent language skills, so I will be happily sharing our 20 years of IB experience at TIS. From a technology point of view, TIS is quite advanced. We are an Apple Distinguished School and we understand the power of technological innovation. We have appointed a digital leadership coach to help teachers navigate digital resources in our classrooms. The past few years, we had two robots here at school. Students programmed the robots going around asking ‘’Are you wearing a mask?’’ From a learning innovation point of view, one of the things we try to introduce at TIS is the sense of service. In Japan, it is very much about helping another person but in schools, very few formalized service programmes are established. It’s a big part of the MYP, and as a school, we try to work with Japanese organizations to introduce our students to service opportunities.  

Since you joined TIS, student-agency and giving students voice and choice has been very high on your agenda. What progress has TIS made in that area? 

When I came in as a Head of School two years ago I noticed that the school had a strong mission statement but not really a set of values that guided the school. I connected with James Dalziel who was developing an online mission, vision, and values course for the Academy of International School Heads (AISH) and invited him to pilot parts of this new course live at TIS for the JCIS network. When the course was finished I continued working with our staff to generate ideas on what values best encapsulate TIS. Then I took these ideas generated by staff to our students and discussed with them what values the staff had come up with. I asked them to look at these ideas and add, change or create new ideas on top of them. We put total ownership into their hands and they got hugely excited about it. Interestingly, they came up with the idea that they wanted it to be memorable and that it had to be in reference to our abbreviation TIS – so they came up with Trust, Inspire and Support as our core values. From there we explored what these values could mean in a broader context. We looked at what behaviour would be in line with these values and what behaviours fall outside of these values. I then worked with the students to develop a code for our entire school community to follow.

You’ve started your work with TIS just months before the global pandemic hit and disrupted school and public life in Japan. How difficult was it to keep going? 

Yes, about 6 months into my tenure, the first lockdown was upon us. The pandemic made it very difficult to keep connected with parents and staff. Normally, you get to know your community during your day-to-day work and during social interaction. This hasn’t happened so much lately. We have a great roof terrace on our school building and I am looking forward to having these opportunities where our community can reconnect. On a professional level, we came together even closer during the pandemic as we had to pull together. The opposite happened with the parent community, we really miss them coming to school and we hope this will change again soon. When we are able to bring people back on campus, our school life and the culture at TIS will flourish once again. We also have big plans in regard to our campus development. We have been in talks with local developers and are hoping to move to a very modern-style campus in the near future. It's early days for me at TIS but I am confident that we will keep thriving and moving forward in the years to come. 

Thank you, Daniel! Keep pioneering and stay connected!

Learn more about Daniel’s work at TIS: www.tokyois.com and follow him LinkedIn