At RD American School (RDAS) in Singapore, your child learns from a faculty of experienced international educators: a specialist for every core subject, from reading and math to art, English, and Chinese, with a dedicated learning support team so no child is left behind.
We believe great education lives in every conversation with a child, as much as at the front of the room. We bring together educators with years of teaching experience, who hold to demanding American and international standards and are warm with children. Every teacher here knows their field and knows how to guide a child through it.
ELEMENTARY
From kindergarten through Grade 5, a homeroom teacher holds most of your child's day, and specialists teach art, music, and Chinese.
Lead Teacher · Grade 1
Leanne Shang
Orton-Gillingham is the gold-standard approach to structured literacy: reading taught through systematic phonics, one sound at a time. Leanne’s specialty is the first and hardest hurdle, the moment a child goes from guessing at words to actually reading them. For a slower starter, everything turns on that moment. Clear it early, and the confidence carries into every subject that follows.
Lead Teacher · Grades 4/5
Allison Atherton
Grades 4 and 5 are where a child starts carrying more of the load alone: longer assignments, harder math, more decisions of their own. Allison has taught this exact age for ten years, and she runs a classroom where the standard is high and the help arrives before a child has to ask for it. Math curriculum design is her own field of work, so when your child meets the wall that fractions and long division put in front of every fourth grader, she can already see which step came loose.
Lead Teacher · Math Coordinator
Stephanie Ringler
As RDAS’s Math Coordinator and Lead Teacher, Stephanie teaches math and built the framework the whole school teaches it by. She builds sharp number sense and the patience to think a problem all the way through, so a child stops fearing math and starts using it to read the world. That way of reasoning takes years to build, and it becomes the strongest thing your child carries forward.
Art
Aparna Patil
Art is the first language a child speaks to understand the world. At an age when words fall short, Aparna reads the feeling on the page and gives a child the courage to say exactly what’s inside. She knows Chinese brush painting and Western drawing alike, and moves children freely between them until they find a style of their own. Every class leaves a child with a little more skill and a little more nerve. A child walks out holding a piece they’re proud of, and a reason to make the next one.
Chinese
Wendy Qiu
Wendy builds the Chinese curriculum level by level, so a native speaker stays stretched in the same room where a beginner feels safe to try. A child two years ahead and a child just starting both get a lesson pitched exactly to them. Your child is met where they are, whether Chinese is home to them or brand new. Wendy is the teacher who makes RDAS’s bilingual promise something a child actually lives.
Music
Michelle Lim
Michelle teaches music the way children actually learn it. She lets them invent their own marks for sound before they ever meet a musical staff, and improvise freely, so music arrives first as something they make, then something they can name. Her lessons pull different grades, and even teachers, into a single project, held together by the plain joy of making music side by side.
Physical Education
Zul Fadlie
Before teaching, Zul coached youth triathletes through swimming, cycling, and running, three sports where a child’s only opponent is the time they posted last month. He brought that yardstick into the classroom: a child in his class is measured against the child they were in September, and they can watch the gap close. Water competence runs through what he teaches, which counts for a great deal in a city built around water. Fourteen years in, he is still a student himself.
MIDDLE SCHOOL
From Grade 6 your child moves between teachers who have spent their careers inside a single subject. These seven come from international schools across Singapore, South and East Asia, Africa, and the United States.
Humanities
Jeneane Paxson
Jeneane has seen three of Singapore’s strongest schools from the inside. What she works on now is the part parents rarely see: teaching a twelve-year-old to notice how their own thinking is going, and to correct course before an adult steps in. As a cognitive coach she teaches by asking, and children leave her class able to explain their own reasoning back to her. She joined RDAS while the school was still being built, which tells you most of what you need to know about her.
Humanities
Julio Bolivar
Julio teaches middle schoolers the way he teaches his AP research students: find the source, weigh it, build the argument, defend it out loud. Ten years in a large American public high school taught him how to pitch that work at twelve without thinning it. The three words he took from the school where he started still describe the job for him: educate, affirm, inspire. A child in his room learns to disagree with a text, with evidence and with courtesy.
Math & Science
Ryan Rego
Ryan teaches science the way scientists work: a question first, then a way to test it. He is also the teacher other teachers come to for technology, and he is exacting about it. A simulation earns a place in his lesson by showing a child something the printed page keeps hidden. He builds the quick checks that surface a misconception in the week it forms, while it is still small enough to fix in a conversation.
Math & Science
Thomas Coon
Thomas has taught science to students who arrive with a dozen different first languages and a dozen different levels of English, which is exactly what an RDAS classroom looks like. He keeps the science demanding while making the language reachable, so a child still finding their English stays inside the thinking. After school he runs a Dungeons & Dragons club, and that says something about how he teaches: hand a child a problem worth solving and a role worth playing, and they will read, calculate, and argue for hours.
Chinese
Jane Chen
Middle school is where many children decide privately whether Chinese is their own language or a subject being done to them. Jane’s answer is to give them something to say: a debate, an essay with their name on it, a competition entry. She coaches students into Chinese speech and writing competitions, and once a child wins an argument in Chinese, the language becomes theirs.
Physical Education
Lingesh Gunasekaran
Lingesh has coached soccer players from grassroots to elite, and the child he plans for first is the one who dreads PE. His subject is physical literacy: using the body well, and keeping the will to use it, which outlives any team a child makes or misses. He builds a lesson so that the least confident student in the room has something to do that is hard for them and within their reach. The children who already compete find him too, since he has coached at academy level and run strength and conditioning for student athletes.
LEARNING SUPPORT
Three colleagues work alongside the classroom teachers, from kindergarten through Grade 8: for the child who needs English, the child who needs more time, and the child who needs an adult to notice.
Lead Teacher · EAL & Learning Support
Lynn Friesen
Lynn is the bridge for children whose first language isn’t English, and she brings them into the classroom without fear. Her psychology training means she watches a child’s confidence through the transition to English as closely as she watches their grammar. That answers the question every parent is already asking: will my child fall behind, or feel ashamed speaking English? With Lynn nearby, your child catches up while still feeling capable and safe.
Student Engagement & Learning Specialist
Rebecca Crasto
Rebecca works from cognitive science, and under her, inquiry-based learning is something a child does every single day, in every lesson. Children learn to ask sharper questions and to check their own thinking, and that skill outlasts any test. It is what a child stands on when the next hard thing arrives.
Learning Assistant
Shamil Jumali
Shamil reads a room. In the busy gaps of a lead teacher’s day, he catches the small shifts in a child’s mood and responds warmly, right at the moment it matters. This is social-emotional learning as a daily habit. For a child who is new, or quiet by nature, Shamil is the steady presence in the classroom that says every feeling here is seen and understood.
