Darius: Chicago Heights tutor

Certified Tutor

My time in school has developed my philosophy of valuing each child as an individual, as
well as part of a community. I aim to give children as many learning opportunities and
experiences as possible in order to engage, motivate and prepare them for future life. An
appropriate, balanced, challenging and creative curriculum is essential in developing
children's skills, knowledge and understanding. These all underpin personalised learning.

I have in particular come to understand the value of sharing learning objectives and success criteria with children. Knowing exactly what is expected and how they can achieve allows children to focus more clearly on tasks. This also facilitates effective self and peer assessments, as there are clear criteria and objectives to assess against, encouraging children to take more responsibility for their own learning.

Progression needs to be planned for, so that as children work and explore at their own pace, there is always something else ready to move them on and take them further in their learning. I also believe that differentiation and meeting varied learning styles are key to effective teaching and learning. Work should be set at an appropriate, but challenging, level. When I prepare lessons I make a conscious effort to ensure I am not just catering for visual learners like myself, but try to see lessons through other learners' eyes. For example, to introduce Year 2 children to pictograms, I got the children to create 'human pictograms' arranged by name length, pets, eye colour, etc. and then transferred that information as pictograms to the board. Kinaesthetic learners were thereby catered for in the physical movement and manipulation, visual learners in the pictograms created on the board, and audio learners as we discussed and interpreted the graphs.