Biology & Chemistry · IB · A Level · IGCSE
I am a biology and chemistry teacher, IB Diploma Biology examiner and former Director of Research, with a PhD in immunology and virology from the National University of Singapore. I spent five years in a laboratory before I taught, and students are expected to ask a clear question and support an answer with evidence.
Teaching philosophy
Every learner, regardless of language, background or starting point, deserves the chance to excel. My job is to build the scaffolds that get them there, and to know when to take them away.
Before teaching, I spent five years in laboratory research, first at Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory and then completing a PhD on Saffold virus at the National University of Singapore. That experience shapes how I teach: science is a way of thinking, not a list of facts.
In the classroom I combine inquiry and practical work with explicit support for language, especially for students learning in English as an additional language. I collect evidence on what works, reflect on it, and adjust. That habit drives my research projects, from STEM clubs to scaffolded writing in chemistry.
As a leader I have led science departments, built a research programme from the ground up and mentored newly qualified teachers. What decides whether any of that lasts is whether colleagues feel supported enough to stay.
Teaching
Teaching is what I do. Learning is what the student does. They are not the same thing, so I plan for them separately. Both of my subjects share one difficulty: a scientific explanation moves between levels of description, and experts move between those levels without noticing. Students cannot. For each subject below I set out the learning problem, then how I teach it, then how I check it is working.
Chemistry is taught at three levels: what you can see in the beaker, what the particles are doing, and the symbols we write down (Johnstone, 1982, 1991). Experts move between these levels without thinking about it. Students cannot hold all three at once, so their working memory overloads (Johnstone, 1991; Sirhan, 2007).
Biology has the same difficulty. A phenomenon appears at one level, but its causes sit at another: a fever explained by a protein, a population explained by a gene (Schneeweiß & Gropengießer, 2022). Students tend to reason at one level only, so they can name a structure without explaining it.
Leadership
When I took my first department leadership role, I could have written the unit plans and assessment routines myself and handed them over. I built them with the team instead. It took longer and it held, because the people using a system should have a hand in making it. Consistency is also a form of fairness: students deserve the same quality of planning and assessment whichever teacher they have.
At CBIS I ran a professional development programme for newly qualified and untrained science teachers, and not one member of the team left that year. At Merchiston I mentored three new teachers through curriculum implementation. I treat retention as a result of how people are supported, not as a target in itself.
The hardest part of running a year-long STEM club was not the teaching or the research design. It was bringing parents on board with an activity that had no immediate effect on grades. I learned to explain the purpose of enrichment as carefully as I plan it, and the results eventually made the case on their own.
Fifty students completed independent research projects under the programme I designed at SIFC, and the design question was never how to process them. It was how to make sure each one had a supervisor who knew their project, regular conversations and clear milestones. A 95% completion rate came from that, not from chasing deadlines.
Career
Research
Eight peer-reviewed publications in virology, and a habit of testing my own teaching with evidence.
Two plan–act–observe–reflect cycles with a Grade 9 IGCSE Chemistry class of mostly EAL learners. When scaffolds were withdrawn too quickly, the mean score on extended writing fell to 39.6%.
A case study of teaching-assistant-led small-group re-teaching and bilingual support for a group of EAL learners in an IGCSE Biology classroom at a British international school in Shenzhen.
A year-long mixed-methods study with Grade 8 students, randomly grouped into an experimental group (STEM club plus regular lessons) and a control group. The experimental group’s assessment grades rose by about 20% on average over the year while the control group’s dipped slightly.
Teaching portfolio
Each year: the context, my goals, what I did, the impact and what I learned, linked to the UK Teachers’ Standards.
The current year: completing the PGCE with an action research study on scaffolding extended writing in Grade 9 Chemistry.
Joining King’s and beginning a University of Sunderland PGCE: refining my classroom practice through supervised teaching and practitioner research.