World Class Learning
World Class Learning is about helping students love learning again.
Meixi Ng was born and raised in Singapore, where much of the education system revolved around rote memorization and high stakes testing. Following her graduation from the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, she traveled to study various education systems around the world. It was through living in rural Mexico that she found Tutoria, a teaching method that gets right to the core of learning. It involves using questions to guide a student through his/her Inquiry Project of choice, and once mastered, he/she tutors someone else. After much persistence, Meixi has been given 2 years and 2 classes of students to prove her belief that Tutoria could transform from bottom up the way students learn in Singapore schools.
World Class Learning spends a year in her classroom, giving an intimate look at her efforts to help students re-kindle that natural love for lifelong learning through the stories of two of her students. World Class Learning will explore what it truly means to prepare our students for life in today’s world.
Meixi Ng – Founder, Fifty Fold
Meixi grew up very acutely aware of the injustices that especially in areas of education for marginalized communities. In 2009, she was recognized as one of the Goldman Sachs Global Leaders and in 2010, the first Asian recipient of the Circumnavigators fellowship for world travel and study, Meixi traveled to Guatemala, Perú, Singapore, Thailand, Ghana and France to research and study the work in schools in marginalized communities. After graduation, Meixi worked at NorthLight School until she left in August 2011 on the Princeton in Latin America Fellowship to México to work with the national strategy team to improve academic achievement (EIMLE) for its Spanish abbreviation with the Secretary of Education in México. In México, she worked with Dr Gabriel Cámara and his team to transform the 9000 worst-performing schools in the country, using Relación Tutora as way of teaching and learning in the classroom. Intrigued by the Tutorial Relationships framework, she conducted ethnographic research on the effects of the national strategy in a community in Zacatecas and presented a policy paper titled The Healing Power of Tutorial Relationships in Mexico City, Zacatecas, Veracruz and Campeche. Since then she was written more works on Tutorial Relationships and is presenting her paper at the National Institute of Education’s Annual Conference – Redesigning Pedagogy in June 2013. Since August 2012, Meixi has moved back home to Singapore and founded FiftyFold Consultancy to work with public schools in Singapore and also the greater Southeast Asian region to implement tutorial relationships for students, especially in communities desperate for powerful learning.
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Director’s Statement
My interest in these new curriculums and teaching methods really stem from my own experience of growing up in a very “exam-driven” educational system in Singapore, where school to me was more about learning to get the good grades than it was about learning… actually learning. World Class Learning will be my debut feature documentary.
Through the film, I’d love to inspire teachers, parents and students alike to find within themselves their own natural love for learning. With so much debate about the education system in recent months, World Class Learning will help better inform the discussion as it gives viewers a more in-depth classroom experience over the course of a year.
I also envision that as part of the film’s transmedia engagement campaign, we will build a single web platform that will serve as a one-stop community resource focused on student engagement for educators looking to share and learn best practices from others just like themselves.
Shuling Yong 