Our Team
“There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” – Edith Wharton
Here are illum.e, our passionate and driven educators do both - in being the candles to light the fire and motivations of learning and to be the mirror to help your child achieve their utmost.
Every tutor is carefully selected, trained and groomed to help your child achieve excellence.
Contact: timothy.chia@illum.education
Mr Timothy Joshua Chia-Lee
Curriculum Lead and Head Tutor
Former MOE Subject Head of English, innovating redesigns of curricula with 21st century learning and alignment to the latest English Syllabus 2020. Having taught since his National Service days, Timothy possesses decades of teaching and tutoring experience in English and General Paper along with expertise in leading and training other educators and professionals. He has personally overseen the academic and holistic success of over 2500 students and educators.
Winner of multiple education and teaching awards with MOE, inclusive of multiple Outstanding Contribution Awards (individual), innovation awards, and MOE AST’s Innovator Award for English Language and Literature (2020), Timothy was awarded the English Language Institute of Singapore’s Research Grant in 2018, with completed research on English Language Writing, which was published in the ELIS Research digest on Classroom Inquiry, and presented at the Singapore’s Teachers’ Conference in 2019. He is also certified by Research for Better Teaching (RBT) as part of the Skillful Teaching Programme (STP).
Featured in MOE’s micro-teaching videos for Differentiated Instruction, Timothy is a big believer in Differentiated Instruction (Tomlinson, 1999), understanding the unique differences that unlocks how students learn in their personalised ways to achieve success. Timothy is also the curriculum director at Edimpact, a leading education and training consultancy firm in Singapore, spearheading the development of workshops, webinars and modules to and coach to educators locally and internationally to improve their pedagogy and redesign school curricula for better, deeper learning. Timothy thus leads the illum.e team in ensuring that lessons are designed and strategically customised so that every child can achieve their fullest potential to grow with every lesson.
Timothy has wrote multiple assessment books with Marshall Cavendish, and serves as their educational consultant for English Language. He is also a published author in books on poetry and short stories. He is a featured panelist in Singapore Writers’ Festival 2021 & 2022 and has a following of tens of thousands of readers worldwide through various social media platforms.
Contact: roger.etienne@illum.education
Mr Roger-Etienne
English Language Lead (Jurong Campus)
Former MOE English teacher with decades of experience since he began teaching in 2000. With a wide repertoire of teaching experiences in multiple primary and secondary schools across all streams, ‘Mr Roger’, as he is fondly called by his students, is an English Language specialist who leads illum.e’s team in ensuring high quality English language learning.
His pedagogic strength lies in making the English Language simple to grasp and apply for all students, by demystifying the complexities of language through step-by-step strategies of Scaffolding (Ninio & Bruner, 1978) and Making Thinking Visible (Ritchhart, 2011). With his sound pedagogy, his students are able to appreciate the nuances of the language and grow in self-confidence in the English Language.
Mr Roger believes that every child can and wants to learn when given the opportunity to succeed and with encouragement. As an affable and passionate educator, his former students have described him as their “best teacher ever”, “favourite teacher”, “the teacher who made me understand and appreciate English”, and under his guidance, students have improved rapidly by two to four grades.
Mr Roger is also a seasoned choral and solo performer, singing locally and overseas for various performances to large audiences. He translates these skills into his teaching of English, particularly in the finer points of oral communication, to guide students to be composed in oral examinations, public speaking and to use good articulation, pronunciation and voice projection. Mr Roger is also a published English assessment book writer with Marshall Cavendish.
Contact: david.lee@illum.education
Mr David Lee
IP and Humanities Lead
MOE-trained teacher and former subject coordinator with a decade's experience designing and teaching engaging curricula anchored on the belief that every child can and will do well. With a wide repertoire of teaching approaches across all streams and streams, Mr Lee's pedagogic strength lies in making the subject simple to understand and score in for all students, with those under his charge improving in confidence and frequently making the jump from fail to distinction.
Mr Lee has been teaching English Language and IP English for more than a decade, helping various students from different backgrounds achieve As in English, IP English and Language Arts. A firm believer in Piaget’s work and cognitivism, Mr Lee's lessons builds upon various conceptualised models and tools to help learners process information better, and to organise instructions in a sequenced and understandable, meaningful manner. This is why many students have found his lessons to be distinctively impactful to their learning after one or two lessons!
At illum.e, we believe in having top school alumni teach your children. It is an unfortunate fact that many teachers of our children in mainstream and even IP schools had average or below-average PSLE/academic scores in their own student days. Holding a Masters in Education, and currently completing his doctoral studies, the soon to be Dr Lee was a top student from Raffles Junior College in his educational life, with his GP Promotional Exams essay being featured in KS Bull. He is also the recipient of several Outstanding Contribution and innovation awards from MOE and has also presented at the MOE Teachers' Conference and ExCEL Fest. He strongly believes in interactive and meaningful classroom experiences to stretch the boundaries of every child's learning, to ensure that every child takes away more knowledge at the end of the lesson always.
As an avid believer in the growth mindset, Mr Lee regularly represents Singapore in his spare time on various educational networking platforms, including at the Asia-Europe Foundation's Classnet Conference in Tokyo, Japan. He has also written scientific papers spearheading research into invasive species in Singapore as well as led efforts to collect data on microplastics in NParks' marine conservation survey. In his spare time, he writes poetry for relaxation and is a published author of assessment books with Marshall Cavendish.
Contact: shanhao.liew@illum.education
Mr Liew Shan Hao
Language and GP Specialist, JC2 Lead
Teacher with 8 years of teaching experience, having taught in MOE Secondary Schools and Junior Colleges. With an NUS double major in Political Science and Southeast Asian Studies, Shan Hao is illum.e’s resident curriculum expert for politics, economy, governance, Southeast Asia and the wider Asian Region.
As a polyglot, Shan Hao is fluent in English, Mandarin, Thai, Indonesian, with moderate proficiency in regional languages like Vietnamese. Having served as an official translator in many settings, including for NUS, Shan Hao applies this experiences with language acquisition and cross-cultural interaction to assist students, including non-native speakers, in the mastery and learning of English.
A firm believer in cross-disciplinary learning, Shan Hao’s pedagogical focus hones critical thinking within students (Bailin et al. 1999b) to help them understand abstract ideas and themes between the ‘O’ and ‘A’ level syllabi, particularly through the use of examples and non-examples to stimulate critical understanding (Dewey, 1910, 1933). Many students enjoy his lessons because he is able to articulate and explain complex concepts or ideas in an understandable way without undermining intellectual vigour.
Contact: MC.deline@illum.education
Ms MC Deline
General Manager and Primary School Language Specialist
An experienced educator with over 16 years of teaching experience, Ms Deline is a highly sought after Primary School Specialist with experience in schools and well-known educational centres or institutes. Previously the Head of Department in English Language, Deline brings a wealth of expertise in training students in achieving success with the Gifted Education Programme (GEP).
Her pedagogy sees a reflection of her own personal traits with persistent high energy, adaptiveness and a continual dedication to the craft which younger students pick up, mirror and grow with. Her students in turn become highly intrinsically and extrinsically motivated, and are known to always be on task, and completing their work to their utmost efforts.
As an expert in GEP, students can expect a variation of class activities to tickle their linguistic and general ability, ranging from fun analogies, word ladders, anagrams, positioning, code thinking skills and many more.
A dedicated mother, Ms Deline spends most of her free time spending time with, and caring for his family, which in turn helps her ensure that illum.e’s operational plans are meticulously prepared with parents and students in mind first, as always.
Contact: jiaqi.yeo@illum.education
Mr YEO JIA QI
Language and GP Specialist, JC1 Lead
An NTU Linguistics and Multilingual Studies graduate with a second major in Public Policy and Global Affairs, Jia Qi is an experienced teacher who draws on his extensive understanding of both language and the world to help students gain deeper insights into their English and General Paper. A Prime Minister’s Book Prize for Bilingualism winner, Jia Qi is effectively bilingual and can teach in both English and Mandarin, empowering students to express themselves and appreciate the various building blocks of language.
A Nanyang Scholarship recipient and Dean's Lister, Jia Qi is a straight As student who also attained first-class honours in his university course, and he brings both his energy and pursuit of excellence into the classroom to help students to achieve their best and cultivate intellectual curiosity. Passionate about helping students understand the complexities of the modern world, Jia Qi’s lessons are based on Critical Thinking Pedagogy (Brookfield, 2011), encouraging students to ask questions and think deeply, systematically and evaluatively. As Confucius advised, "learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous". Convinced that the joy of learning comes not just from discovering new things but seeing what was previously known in a new light and drawing previously unseen connections between things and across disciplines, he always seeks to distil what he teaches into easily understood principles and techniques that students can efficiently and independently apply.
A true linguist at heart, Jia Qi will be looking to fulfil his further goals in academia after he achieves his objective in making a difference to his students’ lives at illum.e. His other interests include writing science fiction, with a short story of his having once won first prize in an A*STAR competition.
Mr Derrick Liew
Principal Economics Tutor
Derrick Liew is an NUS Business Graduate with First Class Honours with extensive teaching experience in guiding students and using relevant, real-life case studies to make learning engaging and memorable. With experience and expertise in the industries of education, technology, and real estate in addition to the start-up scene, Derrick brings onboard a vast wealth of knowledge critical in delivering interesting and impactful economics content and case study explanations.
A firm believer in constructivism and collaborative approaches to learning, Derrick believes that learning economics goes beyond the books. Derrick ensures true deep learning by immersing students in real-life case studies to break them down into their fundamental economic principles. As such, students can expect active participation in live discussions to express and articulate their viewpoints and perspectives while being scaffolding to be evaluative in their analysis. Cross-learning between students, aided by educational technology, is highly prevalent during his classes, which empowers students to understand differing perspectives, analysis and evaluative techniques to score well in Economics.
In his free time, Derrick enjoys hiking and creating YouTube videos. As a true enthusiast and believer in the understanding and application of economics in real-life, his channel features an array of genres from travel vlogs, real-estate analysis to even automobile content!
Contact: joachim.chia@illum.education
Mr Joachim Chia
Language and Primary School Specialist
A former MOE Primary School English teacher with over a decade of teaching experience, Mr Joachim Chia has helped many students over the years achieve better results in English by breaking down the components and helping them understand the requirements better. As a firm believer of Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, he is able to enable students to pick up simple or abstract concepts through role-modelling, thinking aloud strategies and simulating thinking processes. Through this, hundreds of students have improved their English learning with his mentoring, especially with the use of the Gradual Release of Responsibility instructional framework.
With the aim of helping his students become empathetic communicators, discerning readers and creative inquirers, Joachim is constantly finding new ways to make his lessons engaging, fun and interesting. Lessons are known to be engaging and interactive, with close feedback and attention to close learning gaps.
Joachim’s patient and caring approach to teaching ensures that his students are able to develop a deep understanding of the language and become confident and motivated learners.
In his free time, Joachim is an avid basketball player, always keen to improve his skills and teamwork on and off the court, although he spends most of his free time having fun learning with his three children.
Contact: andre.yeo@illum.education
Mr Andre Yeo
English Language Lead (Novena Campus)
Former MOE English Subject Head with 8 years of teaching experience, largely leading school’s English syllabi and curriculum and preparing graduating students to score for national examinations. Possessing the expertise and experience in teaching all the different levels and streams, Mr Yeo has a comprehensive understanding of various pedagogical methods in effectively teaching students to excel and in developing streamlined and impactful curriculum.
Mr Yeo believes that with the right pedagogy and support, any student will be able to learn and do better for themselves. This belief through developing both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (Sansone & Harackiewciz, 2000) guides his strategy for lesson planning: to match lesson objectives and activities proactively to the current abilities and needs of his students and building up knowledge and skills through spiral progression. Under his mentorship and guidance, his students no longer struggle to pass the subject, and instead feel confident in doing well and excel.
Having studied Sociology as his major in NUS, Mr Yeo has a broad knowledge of different cultures and societies. He often utilises this knowledge in his lessons, be it as a comprehension passage on war, or a class discussion on environmental issues, or an essay outline about how technology has revolutionised our lives. It is also the reason why he set up his school’s debate club to build students’ ability to discern current affairs and to argue well. He strongly believes in the adage that ‘Knowledge is Power’. It is important to him that his students know about what is happening out there in the world and be equipped with the right skills, so that they can be adequately prepared for what the future will bring them.
In his free time, Mr Yeo enjoys playing and collecting the Pokémon Trading Card Game. He occasionally plays in local tournaments, and finds joy in experimenting with strategies outside of the metagame. His favourite Pokémon is Bulbasaur!
Contact: evan.han@illum.education
Mr Evan Han
Humanities Specialist
With over ten years of experience as an MOE-trained teacher specialised in the Humanities, namely History and Social Studies, Mr Han has taught in multiple schools that have spanned from the east to the west of Singapore. With a Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE), he was also a recipient of the MOE Service Excellence Award for rendering quality service to students and parents. He believes in making the classroom a place for education and fun to make learning more engaging for his students. This is further amplified in Mr Han’s ability to develop strong positive teacher-student relationship with his students, who find his lessons interesting and enriching.
Having studied in the UK and USA for five years, Mr Han graduated from the London School of Economics (LSE) with a Honours in International Relations and a Masters in Business Management. He also did his summer exchange programme in Harvard University to do a minor in Economics. His international experience has given him the unique perspective of providing students with advice on how to apply for higher education in the US and UK and what life is like studying overseas. This also serves as an inspiration to his students, who aspire to pursue an education in world renown international universities.
In addition to his international education experiences, Mr Han is also active on social media, especially on YouTube. During the pandemic, he self-taught himself video editing skills and created various YouTube videos to facilitate teaching and learning remotely during the Home-Based Learning (HBL) period. Videos were made to teach History content on World War II and on the Role of the Government in Singapore for Social Studies. The videos were so well-received that he was invited to the National Institute of Education (NIE) to train current and future teachers on how to create videos for teaching and learning inside and outside of the classroom.
You can also feel inspired in the learning of the Humanities by joining one of Mr Han’s classes.
Contact: kp.chuah@illum.education
Mr KP Chuah
Language and General Paper Specialist
An NIE-trained English and GP teacher, KP has taught General Paper and English for more than a decade. A decorated educator with a Masters of Education from NIE and a CELTA Teaching Certificate by Cambridge, KP is deeply passionate about helping students unlock and reach their greatest potential.
KP's pedagogy involves breaking things down into simple and easy-to-remember bits of information, so that students can easily grasp complex subjects like GP and English. Students have experienced massive improvement in exams by applying the skills learned. He is a big believer in blended learning (Bergmann 2012) and its potential to optimize the time spent in class — rather than just assimilating information, class time should be spent on higher-order thinking activities and receiving feedback from tutors. He began experimenting with blended learning even before COVID-19 hit and before Zoom was a thing.
Dedicated to helping as many students as he can, KP is often recognised by students for running his various GP and English workshops or webinars on YouTube which are free for all students to attend. His online crash courses have thousands of viewers from all over the world. One of his missions in life is to see students succeed in not just GP, but also in all the other aspects of their lives. After all, English and GP are all about encouraging students to exercise their critical thinking skills so that they can make sound decisions in life.
Contact: faris.ridzuan@illum.education
Mr Faris Ridzuan
IP English and General Paper Specialist
A First Class Honours graduate majoring in sociology and minoring in European Studies, Faris is a current Masters of Arts student in the National University of Singapore. Concurrently, he serves as an academic Tutor for Asian Studies in the College of Humanities and Sciences. As an outstanding student, Faris is the recipient of the Tan Ean Kiam Postgraduate Scholarship, the Malay Studies Postgraduate Scholarship, the Muis-Warees Bursary and the National University of Singapore Tuition Allowance Award. He was also the inaugural recipient of the ISEAS-Muis Scholarship in 2020 and received the Excellence Award (Anugerah Cemerlang) and was a regular Dean’s Lister and a Dean’s Scholar, and was appointed the Class Champion for his graduating cohort. Faris was a policy officer under the Public Service Leadership Programme, and has contributed to curriculum education policy work in educational developments such as the planned Singapore Islamic College and the Postgraduate Certificate in Islam in Contemporary Societies.
For more than a decade, Faris has been honing his skills as a polymath educator, specialising in General Paper, English, Speech and Drama, Debates, French, Social Sciences, Social Studies and Literature in various international and national organisations. He is also Head Tutor in the Mendaki Tuition Scheme and an Academic Tutor for NUS social science modules taught under the Postgraduate Certificate in Islam in Contemporary Societies, having won numerous awards in teaching and facilitation. Faris’s philosophy of education draws from plural traditions and interdisciplinary fields such as educational psychology and neuroscience to ensure differentiated learning, mastery learning and holistic development of students’ thinking processes and perspectives.
As a budding academic and scholar, Faris has published academic research, discourses, essays, poems, critiques, articles and op-eds in Malay and English media such as BeritaMediacorp, Berita Harian, The Straits Times and Today, in academic journals such as Taylor and Francis, Raden Mas Said State Islamic University Electronic Journal, in Fulcrum and ISEAS Perspective and on other platforms. He has also been appointed as Singapore's national representative for international programs and summits in Singapore and abroad such as France and Japan, for programmes such as those related to the Japan-ASEAN summit and ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting).
In his free time, Faris enjoys composing poems, songs and playing music and singing in Malay, Arabic, French, German and English and has his own YouTube and TikTok music channel, and has been commissioned to emcee and sing at weddings, events held at venues such as Timbre, the International Migrants Day 2022 celebrations. He will also be publishing his first original song with a US based company and is in the midst of working with the production team. He is also involved in theatre and has been a director for several Malay and French plays. He also likes to exercise and does weight lifting and sports like badminton and cycling.
Contact: jenny.huang@illum.education
MS JENNY HUANG
Language and Primary School Specialist
As a NUS undergraduate candidate, Jenny is a proud graduate of Hwa Chong Institution, where she received the Hwa Chong Diploma with Distinction. This award recognized her exceptional performance in areas of academics, extracurricular activities, and leadership abilities. With a passion for teaching, Jenny has successfully guided students from primary school, secondary school and junior college, honing her skills as a supportive and adaptable teacher.
Jenny believes in providing high-quality education for each and every child, regardless of their background. She expertly employs renowned teaching pedagogies such as Bloom's Taxonomy, the Socratic Method, and the Zone of Proximal Development to ensure her students receive tailored, effective instruction. With a heart to serve, she has committed to serving the community by offering free tutoring to underprivileged children throughout her academic career. Partnering with organizations like CDAC, Jenny has mentored primary school students in English and Mathematics, making a meaningful impact on their educational journey. Her dedication to teaching extends internationally, as she has developed English resources and conducted workshops for high school students in Indonesia and China.
With a focus on creating engaging and enjoyable lessons, Jenny strives to foster a positive learning environment where students can thrive. By incorporating evidence-based teaching strategies, she is able to address individual learning needs and promote academic success. Her students consistently praise her for being a responsible, patient, and approachable teacher, who is always ready to address their questions and concerns.
Contact: yinxuan.teo@illum.education
Ms Teo Yin Xuan
English Language Specialist
An NTU linguistics and multilingual studies major with a strong interest in how languages affect the brain, Yin Xuan has extensive experience in mentoring and guiding students from Primary, Secondary and Junior College levels in their subject mastery. Always keen and passionate in language acquisition in and outside of the classroom, Yin Xuan believes in building a firm rapport to ensure a conducive and empowering classroom experience.
With students feeling at ease to clarify their doubts and to seek help whenever she is in class, Yin Xuan constructs her pedagogy based on Ivan Hannel’s ‘A Pedagogy of Questioning’ (Hannel, 2013), in order to prompt effective questioning, and build a hierarchy of mental acts in the minds of the students to understand the broad patterns and strategies that they are learning. As American Engineer W. Edwards Deming once mentioned “without questions, there is no learning”, and Yin Xuan builds upon this to structure her lessons to be dynamic, and highly participatory in nature to benefit learners of all types who stay engaged and enjoy their learning.
Contact: elizabeth.lin@illum.education
Ms Elizabeth Lin
English and Humanities Teaching and Curriculum Specialist
Ms Elizabeth Lin is an outstanding English and Humanities tutor with a Masters’ in Teaching and eight wonderful years of teaching in prestigious schools across Singapore. She has won several accolades, including the Most Caring Teacher Award, for her unwavering commitment to putting her students’ learning and needs first.
A firm believer that learning should be fun, Ms Lin’s student-centred approach incorporates a range of pedagogical tools to keep students captivated and curious, including interesting facts, tasks and extension materials. Her approach equips students in respective academic competencies and keep them captivated and curious. As a staunch proponent of constructivist teaching, Ms Lin creates a classroom environment that fosters exploration, co-construction, and personal meaning-making. She is also passionate about developing her students into future-ready global citizens, often drawing parallels between Singapore and other societies to broaden their perspectives.
Ms Lin is also a sought-after mentor for Global Issues Problem Solving, Community Problem Solving, and Model United Nations student competitions, where she helps students develop skills to navigate a VUCA world. Her love for culture extends beyond the classroom, as she enjoys immersing herself in local cultures during her travels even as a young parent. Her current muse is observing her toddler's growth and development in this great big world, and she never tires of her cute antics.
Contact: mr.allan@illum.education
Mr Allan
IP English and General Paper Specialist
Mr Allan is a law graduate from the UK. A passionate and driven educator, he spent his free time while pursuing law to teach refugees in the UK for two years. In the process of helping them to pass their English examinations, which was a prerequisite for them to be integrated into the UK workforce, Allan gained valuable experience and found teaching to match his personal zeal to help make the world a better place. Mr Allan also has prior teaching experience in a government school, and gives free voluntary tuition to children in his free time.
Leveraging his law experiences, Mr Allan is able to help students develop strong, cogent arguments and aid them in analysing comprehension passages or case studies effectively. Through his beliefs in the reasoning frameworks of critical discourse and critical thinking pedagogies, Allan's General Paper students are able to ground their answering techniques with sound, effective logic and argumentation. Budding lawyers-to-be have, and will enjoy the intellectual discussions and criticality imbued in his GP lessons.
In his free time, Mr Allan is a firm believer in helping others, using his public speaking skills and legal knowledge to help others. Recently, for example, he was featured as a guest speaker in a charity event in front of hundreds of participants to help the elderly on understanding Wills and Lasting Power of Attorneys.
