There have been no more than ten people in my career who have influenced my teaching – and my understanding of teaching – in a major way. That list includes my mother and father, my university professors, and my teacher-training mentor and tutor. The most recent addition to that list is Mr. Diaz.

Mr. Diaz and I worked together 2012-13 and he taught me almost everything I now know about teaching English at primary school level –and about teaching writing in particular.

I also saw, and was hugely inspired by, a relentless focus on respect for students’ intellects – particularly with regard to the high-potential and high-achievement of the bilingual Chinese-English speaking students we are honoured to teach in Shanghai.

As a teacher of English writing, Mr. Diaz maintains an unflinching focus on accuracy that serves his students extremely well in their pursuit of near-native and native English.

If that were not enough, Mr. Diaz brings his own creative and artistic sensibilities to his students, encouraging flair in their fiction, and personal, imaginative, emotional responses in their literary criticism. 

This simultaneous focus, on accuracy and the nurturing of the “artist-scholar”, takes Mr. Diaz’s students’ work soaring above and beyond the ordinary and the plain, which characterises so much English teaching in Shanghai.

Mr. Diaz is a licensed California State teacher who has taught in primary schools both in the US and in China. In Shanghai, Mr. Diaz has taught in four of the big Chinese international schools, including leadership roles for the development of English at SHSID and Soong Ching Ling School. 

Of course, it’s not my recommendation, or Mr. Diaz’s resume, that matters the most. It’s the high-impact on his previous students’ learning that’s the only important evidence of the difference that Mr. Diaz can make for your child. Retained by an existing base of families, in some cases for many years, who are thrilled with the difference his teaching has made for their child, Mr. Diaz has taken umpteen young learners from basic to good and from good to great.

I am very excited that I have been able to enlist Mr. Diaz for studio’s 2014 summer school – and along with him the radical, brand new, literature-based Kids Canon program, and his high-impact teaching of writing. I look forward to reading your children’s compositions, and to hearing their literature responses, at the end of what promises to be a super month of learning.

—— To be continued —— 

These stories are told from Studio perspective. Every family has its own story with Studio. We’d like to hear and publish yours too. Please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

To receive notifications of new blog posts, please follow us.