The first session with a student will ultimately be a learning experience for both of us. Working together, I like to determine the ways in which they learn the best and the study skills that are effective in their learning. I would like to find the student's strengths and use them to help overcome the areas they are struggling with. I want to work together with them to find the studying techniques they enjoy, and how to apply those to the areas where they are less comfortable.

For the student to become an independent learner, they need to find the confidence to take on challenging topics. I would want to help the student find the learning techniques that work best for them. Once the student can identify these, they can learn to apply them to unknown areas and feel comfortable in more challenging subject areas.

Helping a student keep their confidence up in challenging subject areas is an important part of motivation. It is important to help the student see that a lot of the skills they need to complete a problem or move forward in a subject area could be those that they have learned and understand. For example, complicated math problems can have multiple steps in order to reach a final answer. It would be important in challenging problems like these to point out how to break the problem up into the areas that the student understands and is comfortable completing. Through completing the different steps of the problem utilizing their learned topics, the student sees they are capable in tackling challenging problems. It would also be important to involve the topics that the student is succeeding in to build confidence in those that are more difficult. In the case of math, mixing in problems that they are confident in completing with the challenging ones prevents their frustration from building.