Ms Chan Sew Yoon
Fairfield Methodist School (Primary)
31 years of service
Genuine care builds trust and connection, inspiring a ripple effect that extends from students to families and communities, creating lasting impact far beyond the classroom!
Long before Chan Sew Yoon stood at the front of a classroom, she played teacher during her childhood days. She had a miniature chalkboard and blank papers salvaged from old exercise books, and she took turns with her younger neighbours, teaching, marking, and learning. She was perhaps seven to eight years old then. Few decades later, she hasn't really stopped.
Ms Chan is the kind of teacher whose former students invite her to their graduations, weddings, and baby showers. She designs custom class T-shirts using her students' own drawings. She organises welcome-back celebrations for children returning from long leave abroad. When she read the phrase "To teach is to touch lives forever" as a young woman, it wasn't inspiration, it was recognition.
Last year, when her mother fell gravely ill, her school leaders granted leave immediately and her colleagues reorganised themselves without being asked. When she returned after her mother's passing, her eight-year-olds had covered her desk with handmade cards. Parents wept alongside her. School staff and buddies supported and comforted her and her family.
"Genuine care builds trust and connection, inspiring a ripple effect that extends from students to families and communities, creating lasting impact far beyond the classroom." It was the culture she had spent decades building, flowing back to hold her at the moment she needed it most.
The students she remembers most are the ones who took the longest roads. A boy she first saw caned in the Principal's office in 2010 flew back from Indonesia years later, bringing her a box of local cake to share news of how he was helping his community. A Shooting Club Captain she coached thanked her by name in his Polytechnic Valedictorian Speech, and few years later invited her to his University Graduation Ceremony. A Class Monitor and Group Leader from her Secondary Form Class eventually married each other, and personally delivered their wedding invitation to her at her then serving school.
These are not coincidences. They are what happen when a teacher makes every child feel they belong to something lasting.
Her advice for new teachers: "Passion to start, and stamina to last." At 31 years of service, she has both in abundance.
Ms Raja Shahridah
Beatty Secondary School
13 years of service
Care is not about having all the answers — it is about being present as students find their own.
Raja Shahridah did not attend kindergarten. She only learnt to read in Primary 2. On weekends, when her family splurged on a meal at McDonald's, her parents, both cleaners with limited formal education, would gather the courage to approach strangers at nearby tables: polytechnic students, JC students, anyone who might help their daughter with her homework. Sometimes, they asked to be taught too, so they could go home and teach her in their own way.
Those moments never left her. They taught her that asking for help is not weakness, it is love made visible. They taught her that effort, not means, is what care looks like. And they shaped the educator she would become.
"In many ways, the care my parents showed me is the same care I strive to show my students every day," she says. "Care is not about having all the answers, it is about being present as students find their own."
Ms Shah does not claim to be the most innovative teacher in the room. What she offers her students at Beatty Secondary is something harder to manufacture: presence. She walks alongside them. She struggles with them. She stays.
When a student confided about abuse at home, a trust made possible only by months of quietly built rapport, Ms Shah worked with the school and relevant agencies to move him and his siblings to a safer environment. Today, he holds a leadership role in his residential setting. Another student who came to her disengaged and struggling, marked by poor attendance and lost confidence, is today preparing for her national examinations. Between those two moments lay years of patience, consistency, and belief.
In her Food Science classroom, Ms Shah started a Cooking Sense Series, simple shared meals that grew into a weekly gathering where students open up, reconnect, and begin to believe in themselves again. She has also learnt sign language, not because it was required, but to reach students who communicate differently.
Her parents completed only Primary 6 and Secondary 2 between them. They were cleaners who believed their daughter deserved every chance they never had. Now, Ms Shah offers that same belief to every student who walks through her door.
Mr Shyamsuraj Yadav
Tanjong Katong Girls' School
11 years of service
A caring teacher builds trust before learning, noticing, remembering, and acting in ways that help every student believe in themselves.
In Secondary School, Shyamsuraj Yadav was a student who struggled, academically and at home. His family faced financial hardship. His grades were unsteady. He was not the student anyone would have singled out.
But his Mathematics teacher noticed. She stayed back after school without complaint. She came in on Saturdays. She checked not just on his results, but on how he was coping with everything else, making him feel that his whole life mattered, not just his performance. She is the reason Mr Shyam became a teacher.
His most defining moment came quietly. A Secondary 2 girl had just received her year-end results. He watched her from across the classroom, she was not crying, not reacting, just frozen. Somewhere far away. While the class moved on, Mr Shyam stayed. He did not ask her to explain her results. He did not push her toward reflection. He simply sat beside her in the stillness after dismissal and told her she was not alone.
"Sometimes, the most impactful thing a teacher can do is not to instruct, but to be present."
In the months that followed, she came back for consultations after school hours. She re-engaged in class. She sought him out for guidance on educational pathways and career decisions. Slowly, she began to believe she was not defined by one result.
Another student was coping with the loss of her mother. She came to class hollow, unable to concentrate, unable to retain even simple concepts. Mr Shyam broke content into small steps and shifted his focus entirely to affirming her effort rather than her outcomes. He checked in consistently, celebrated the smallest progress, and held space for her grief without rushing it. Later, she told him it wasn't just the academic help that made the difference. It was knowing someone believed in her when she couldn't believe in herself.
That, for Mr Shyam, is the whole point. His advice to new teachers: "The small moments, checking in, encouraging effort, simply listening, can have a lasting impact. Students may not remember every lesson, but they will remember how you made them feel."
Mr Felix Yeoh
Woodlands Ring Secondary School
21 years of service
I believe that I'm an earthenware vessel bringing knowledge and skill sets to my students. Every scratch, nick or chip has a story to tell in shaping and uplifting them.
Felix Yeoh grew up in a small Malaysian town watching his father, a science teacher, and his community quietly serve one another as an act of love. In that close-knit neighbourhood, he absorbed a lesson that would define his life: care is not a feeling, it is a choice made daily on behalf of someone else.
That lesson followed him to Singapore, through Junior College, through tuition sessions where he watched struggling students suddenly grasp Mathematics for the first time. It followed him through an Engineering degree at NUS, and then, just as the corporate world beckoned, it pulled him into a classroom instead. Twenty-one years later, he has no regrets.
For his first decade, Felix was the firm teacher, stern, demanding, a believer in tough love. His students achieved. But something was missing. A few years in, he noticed that the young people before him had changed. Their needs had shifted in ways his strategies couldn't meet. "Students in general do not care so much about how much I know," he reflected. "Most will only connect and engage once they know how much I care." It was a humbling realization, and a transformative one.
"Some people build walls to keep others away; some build them to find out who is willing to climb over and reach out to them." This philosophy, borrowed from a friend, captures what Felix has come to understand about the adolescents in his care. Many who seem most unreachable are not trying to shut the world out, they are watching to see who will make the effort to reach them anyway. Felix rebuilt his entire practice around that effort. He listens before he speaks. He stays present not just in the classroom, but in the corridors and ordinary moments most adults walk past.
His proudest chapter remains founding a NCDCC unit from scratch as a young teacher. In three years, the unit won competition after competition. But the trophies were never the point. What moved him was watching his cadets eventually take over the training, mentor their juniors, and pass the spirit forward. "I am most proud of watching them grow," he says quietly.
