Wu Rongjin

Wu Rongjin is the principal of Luwan No.1 Primary School in the Huangpu District of Shanghai. As the first teacher to advocate “emotional education” – a personal method of teaching she has been actively exploring for 17 years. She has long focused on the emotional needs of students and helped students cultivate positive emotions to face study and life. Wu Rongjin has achieved excellent results in every aspect of her teaching practice including school management, curriculum planning, classroom work, educational research, team building, and student development.

Dedicated to the developmental needs of students, her curriculum makes use of rich emotional experiences that are grounded in cultural awareness, social background, regional characteristics, and the age of students. Over the last decade, Wu Rongjin has also fully utilised information technology to assist and build on children's development – creating learning spaces that can be used anytime and anywhere, so that every child can drive their own growth. For example, her “Cloud Kitchen” course has cultivated students' home economics skills, and the “Cloud Desk” course has done the same for project learning, while allowing an overall evaluation of each student’s growth based on a number of metrics.

To date, Wu Rongjin has published two books on emotional education, and her courses have been taken up as part of the curriculum for regional primary, secondary and kindergarten schools. Her research results have won the National Education Achievement Award and have been promoted, and she has also won National Model Teachers and Principals of China's Innovative Education. 

If awarded the Global Teacher Prize, Wu Rongjin will set up an Emotional Education Research Centre to train more emotional education teachers for schools and promote the lifelong development of each child.