IB PYP Educator · 18 Years in Education
I am Shawn Höltz — PYP homeroom teacher, former school technology coordinator, and MA Education candidate at the University of Bath. Eighteen years of teaching, mentoring and leading learners across South Africa and China.
About
My own path through education was not smooth. From primary school to university I often felt I would never be able to achieve anything — and I know exactly how heavy that feeling is to carry into a classroom. It is the reason I teach. No student of mine should ever believe their potential has a ceiling. I want every child I work with to know they can make an impact on the world and bring about good change.
The route here was a long one. I started teaching young people in South Africa in 2007 — character education, youth camps, mentorship — completed a BA in Theology, and went on to serve seven years as a district pastor: chairing board meetings, building budgets, making difficult and confidential decisions, and standing in front of the same community week after week. In 2020 I moved to Beijing to teach English, moved into PYP homeroom teaching and school-wide technology coordination, and today I teach Grade 3 at an international bilingual academy.
I am a mechanical person and a systematic problem-solver, and that habit runs through everything: curriculum mapping, a school learning platform I designed and built myself, classrooms that run on structure children can trust, and a rule that technology must reduce friction — not add to it. I hold a PGCE and IB PYP Category 1, completed psychology coursework to honours-entry level, and am now reading for an MA in Education at the University of Bath, specialising in leading in an IB environment.
Teaching, mentoring and leading learners across South Africa and China
Qualified teacher — with distinctions in educational psychology and pedagogy
Education, University of Bath — specialising in leading in an IB environment
How I work
A routine that is not landing, a curriculum gap, a strained relationship, a piece of software — I work through problems the same way, and I teach my students to do the same.
I do not act on the description of a problem — I go and look. Sit with the child, read the assessment data, watch where the lesson actually loses the room, ask the colleague what their day genuinely looks like. Most problems change shape once you see them up close.
A class that cannot settle after lunch is often a timetable problem, not a behaviour problem. A child who "won't write" is often a child who cannot yet start. I keep going until I find the thing that, once changed, makes the symptom stop coming back on its own.
Big rebuilds are usually a way of avoiding the diagnosis. I look for the one change that moves the outcome at the lowest cost — a re-sequenced routine, a clearer scaffold, a tool that removes a repeated task — and then I measure whether it actually worked.
A fix that depends on me is not finished. I document it, train a colleague, watch it run without me, and check back later. That is as true for a classroom routine as it was for the school-wide platform training I led as technology coordinator.
Teaching & learning
I design concept-based units that align Cambridge Global English standards with PYP transdisciplinary themes — learning that crosses subject boundaries through drama, collaborative projects and real-world problem-solving, with genuine student agency at the centre.
I plan backwards from conceptual understanding and map standards onto PYP frameworks — I aligned the full Cambridge Global English syllabus to transdisciplinary themes so coverage and inquiry stopped competing with each other.
NWEA MAP results and daily formative assessment drive personalised pathways for multilingual learners. The data decides the next step — not the next worksheet.
My IB Category 1 focus was implementing agency: student-led discussions, hands-on projects and real choices left genuinely open — so every child has a voice and a stake in the room.
Leadership
Before teaching full-time, I served seven years as a district pastor in South Africa — responsible for three congregations, their boards, budgets and people. It taught me honesty, transparency, readiness for anything, and leading by example. All of it walks into school with me every day.
Standing in front of the same community every week for seven years teaches you honesty, transparency and leading by example.
Technology
My rule as a technology coordinator was simple: technology exists to reduce administrative friction and maximise teacher–student contact time. If a tool does not improve the learning or give the teacher time back, it goes.
Qualifications
Professional development
Work & impact
Cambridge English standards and PYP inquiry were pulling in different directions, and off-the-shelf platforms fragmented the learning. I mapped the full syllabus onto PYP conceptual themes, then designed and deployed a bespoke learning platform to deliver it.
Result: full standards coverage without compromising inquiry — and a clear window into progress for parents.
I inherited a Grade 2 cohort marked by behaviour incidents and strained parent relationships. Instead of punitive measures: a firm-but-fair framework, collaborative inquiry tasks, embedded SEL check-ins, and real rewards for contribution and risk-taking.
Result: incidents dropped, parent confidence returned, and the class became a self-regulating community.
As technology coordinator I led whole-faculty training on planning, portfolios and reporting — then made myself unnecessary with documentation and a champion in every team.
Result: a platform teachers actually use, long after the training day.
From 2009 to 2019 I designed and ran values-based residential camps and leadership programmes across South Africa for cohorts aged six to eighteen — hands-on, engaging, and built to be run by the young leaders themselves.
Result: programmes that outlasted me — the point of all of them.
Demos
Software I designed and built for classrooms, families and students. Two of them, Study Companion and WriteIB, began as ways to help neurodivergent students structure their thinking. Each one runs standalone in your browser on sample data. Nothing is sent anywhere, because there is nowhere to send it. WriteIB is a product I ship — the live site is linked alongside it.
A week's teaching laid out the way teachers actually think about it — blocks you drag into place, each carrying its objective and timed activities, over a timetable you set once and reuse.
Built because planning a week should not mean fighting a template or facing a blank page. Paste the rough notes from your head and they come back as lessons you can move around.
Open demoPhonics stories a child can genuinely read alone. You pick the year group and the week of your scope and sequence, and every single word is checked against the letter-sounds taught so far.
Made for teachers losing evenings hunting for decodable texts that matched the week they were on. A child never meets a spelling pattern nobody has taught them, so reading builds confidence instead of guesswork.
Open demoA screen by the front door where children sign in with a PIN or three pictures and tap what they have done. Points build toward something they chose for themselves.
Built to end the weekly argument about who did what. Every point traces back to a job, so a mistake can be undone without unpicking the week — and the household jobs rotate on their own each Sunday.
Open demoCalendar, tasks and people for a small team, with one trick at its heart: paste the notes from a meeting and it pulls out the dates and the jobs, and works out who was asked to do each one.
Built because what a team agrees in a meeting rarely survives the walk back to the classroom. Everything decided becomes something dated and owned, so nothing quietly lands on whoever happens to remember it.
Open demoA writing tool for IB Diploma students. It breaks an Extended Essay or Internal Assessment into sections with word budgets, and keeps the examiner's criteria beside the draft rather than in another tab.
It began as a way to help neurodivergent students start writing at all — the hard part is holding a whole task in your head, so this holds it for you. Students stop guessing what top marks look like. This one is a product I ship.
Learning to read English, for children aged three to eleven who are meeting it as an additional language. Sixteen stages, from hearing rhyme through to blending letter patterns, in the order reading research puts them.
Built for children handed English words before they could hear the sounds inside them. A short check finds where a child really is, the path moves on only when they are ready, and everything can be read aloud.
Open demoA study workspace for a postgraduate reader: one module at a time, many sources drawn together into a single argument, and flashcards that return on a schedule matched to how memory actually fades.
Built for an ADHD reader — one thing on screen, with the brief, the word count and the marking criteria always in view, because losing the thread means starting over. Useful to anyone who has opened twelve tabs to write one paragraph.
Open demoEverything one primary year group needs in a single place: planning, the register, assessment, reading levels, a fifteen-week reading-intervention programme and reports — with their own views for children and for families.
Built because the same information was living in a dozen spreadsheets and nobody held the whole picture. Teachers stop copying data between systems, children can see their own progress, and families know how their child is doing long before a report lands.
Open demoA maths tutor for nine- to thirteen-year-olds. A short adaptive check finds what a child has genuinely understood, turns it into an ordered path, and works through it one question at a time — asking before telling.
Built because “weak at fractions” is not something a parent can act on. It names the actual mistake — adding the denominators, say — and keeps at it until it is gone, spacing the practice out so it stays gone.
Open demoWellbeing
A dysregulated child cannot access higher-order thinking. Years of pastoral counselling taught me that wellbeing is not an add-on to academics — it is the precondition.
Check-ins and self-regulation routines are embedded in the day and treated as data points — not add-ons when time allows.
Caring, risk-taking, reflection — nurtured deliberately, drawing on years of character education and youth mentorship.
KCSIE-aligned training for international contexts (2024), on top of years of real duty-of-care responsibility for children and vulnerable people.
I have sat with families in their hardest weeks. Rebuilding trust between home and school is slow, deliberate work — and it is work I know how to do.
Off the clock I am usually in the garage or on a motocross bike — I have been taking machines apart my whole life. The systematic habit never switches off; my students get the classroom version of it.
Contact
I am open to PYP homeroom, PYP coordination and technology-integration roles — and always glad to compare notes on inquiry, wellbeing or sensible school technology. Based in Beijing, happy to talk across time zones.
shawn@mrbatman.net
Scan to add me on WeChat