Profiles of Singapore’s Builders and Leaders

Title + Company: Founder & Principal Educator, Edtivate Learning

Overview: Educator and entrepreneur redefining tuition by focusing on thinking skills, confidence building, and holistic student development for the AI-driven future.

Industry: Education / Tuition & Learning Development

Professional Experience: May has extensive experience in education, curriculum development, student coaching, and holistic learning strategies. Through Edtivate Learning, she specialises in helping students develop analytical thinking, metacognition, inference-making, communication, and independent learning skills beyond rote memorisation.

About her: May Lee is a Singapore-based educator and founder of Edtivate Learning, a next-generation tuition centre that goes beyond academic performance to prepare students for an increasingly AI-driven world. Believing that future success requires more than memorising answers, she focuses on nurturing transferable thinking skills, resilience, confidence, communication, and self-awareness in students.

Her teaching philosophy centres on “teaching the whole person” rather than simply training students for examinations. She believes students should become independent thinkers who can adapt confidently to uncertainty and change.

Turning point: A major turning point came when May observed that many hardworking students struggled whenever exam questions were presented differently from what they had memorised. She realised that traditional rote-learning methods were no longer sufficient for preparing students for the future. This led her to rethink education and build a learning approach focused on analytical reasoning, metacognition, and problem-solving skills rather than fixed formulas and model answers.

What she does now: Today, May leads Edtivate Learning, where she coaches students using holistic and thinking-based teaching methods. Her programmes aim to strengthen academic skills while also building confidence, resilience, communication abilities, and independent learning habits. She continues advocating for a shift away from rote memorisation towards future-ready education that equips students to thrive in an AI-shaped world.

SGVisionaries interview:
Meet May Lee: Redefining Tuition as Teaching Thinking Skills

LinkedIn profile: May Lee LinkedIn profile

Website: Edtivate Learning