International School Manila (ISM) is an independent international school with over 2,300 students representing more than 85 nationalities. Established in 1920, ISM is a long-standing member of the Manila community, yet it continues to embrace innovative pedagogy and a curriculum that reflects the best in worldwide educational research and practice.
Guided by its mission to build a vibrant learning community, ISM values lifelong growth, nurtures creativity, and promotes empathy, respect, and ethical living. The school promotes a multilingual ecology in which language represents a fundamental part of identity and culture and forms the basis for thinking, communicating, learning, and making sense of the world.
International School Manila (ISM) takes a holistic, research-informed approach to multilingual teaching and learning, recognizing each child’s linguistic and cultural resources as powerful assets. Multilingualism is embraced as a shared responsibility among educators, families, and the wider school community. To strengthen this commitment, ISM offers Filipino, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and self-taught language and literature courses in the high school, after-school home language programs, and recently introduced Filipino language and culture classes in the elementary school that will continue to expand.
ISM’s sheltered immersion model enables students to learn academic subjects in English while also leveraging their home languages to deepen understanding. This approach promotes academic growth, academic language development, and belonging. Collaborative planning time is embedded into teaching schedules across subjects, which allows EAL specialists and content teachers to plan, teach, assess, and reflect together. Clarity of roles and responsibilities, dedicated planning time, and the use of WIDA as an instructional tool helps promote alignment and coherence in teaching practices.
Professional learning at ISM emphasizes teacher agency, evidence-based practice, and global research partnerships. This culture of innovation and collaboration made hosting the MLRC Research Symposium in January 2026 a natural step, creating opportunities to share practice, learn from international colleagues, and strengthen collective capacity to advance equitable, high-quality education for multilingual learners.
ISM joined the MLRC School Network because it deeply values the opportunity to connect with a global research community that is dedicated to advancing outcomes for multilingual learners. ISM’s professional learning emphasizes teacher agency, evidence-based practice, and current research, which are priorities that align with the goals of MLRC to connect educators with researchers to build bridges between research and practice to empower teachers to find innovative solutions to challenges. Membership enables ISM educators to engage with cutting-edge research, contribute to shared learning, and design evidence-informed innovations in multilingual education. These collaborative possibilities and the network’s focus on socially just, research-based improvement inspired ISM’s commitment to participate and ultimately to host the MLRC Research Symposium in January 2026.
