Tokyo International School

Tokyo International School Pre School was founded in 1994 with just five students enrolled. Today, we have over 380 students and offer Kindergarten through Grade 10. At TIS, students learn lifelong skills, concepts, and values that can be easily transferred across the world and equip them for a rapidly changing, international future. TIS serves the many mobile, expatriate families in Tokyo.

We are committed to the TIS identity as Tokyo’s truly international school in the bustling heart of the city. The diversity within our student and parent community is arguably our greatest resource. Our families represent over 60 nationalities and a range of cultural backgrounds, languages, and beliefs. Our diversity provides our community with a rich opportunity to learn both with and from one another. Students develop an open-mind and develop an understanding that other people, with their differences, can also be right.

Our curriculum, teaching and learning methodology is international. Students learn about big ideas, skills, and strategies which transcend cultures and political boundaries. Students are encouraged to empathize, critique, and consider a range of perspectives as they learn. Staff not only teach this, they model this in and beyond the classroom. Our physical, virtual, texts and human resources are international.

Students have access to multilingual and multicultural resources. Teachers choose materials which uncover our students’ personal identities and the beliefs and cultures of others. Our resources celebrate diversity, challenge stereotypes, and open our students’ minds. Our Japanese host culture is an important, vibrant, and rich resource which we utilize regularly.

TIS is an International Baccalaureate (IB) World School delivering the IB Primary Years Program (PYP) in Kindergarten to Grade 5 and the Middle Years Program (MYP) in Grades 6 to 10. The PYP and MYP curriculum framework begins with the premise that students are agents of their own learning and partners in the learning process. It prioritizes people and their relationships to build a strong learning community.

Students use their initiative to take responsibility and ownership of their learning. By learning through inquiry and reflecting on their own learning, students develop knowledge, conceptual understandings, skills, and dispositions to make a difference to their own lives, their communities, and beyond. The framework emphasizes the central principle of agency: learner empowerment.