Make yourself obsolete to your students.

Get a feel for the student's strengths, weaknesses and learning style. Run through specific questions in weakest areas and improve student's skills.

Helping them learn to approach education from all angles. Drills, as well as critical thinking. Study habits, as well as goal setting and life plans. Show them how to best use the resources they have (the library, their fellow students, teachers, the Internet).

Depends on what it is that's sapping their energy. A student needs ability, tools, and a reason. Sometimes, it's a question of access to learning materials. Sometimes, it's simply not knowing how to tackle a problem. Sometimes, it's a problem of goal orientation. Why would a student who wants to be a baker take a serious interest in physics? There's a time to creatively link subject matter to goals and time to move on to different subject matters.

Read with them. Show them how you analyze paragraphs. Repeat certain texts. Pick interesting subject matter.

Have a calm voice, honesty, persistence, and treat them like a peer instead of a client.

Diagrams. Notecards. Verbal quizzes. Compare note taking strategies. Walk them through step by step and over and over until they see the pattern of approach. Go back and forth between specific instructions and abstract methods until the student can see the subtle differences between questions of the same category.

Help them improve. Give the tools to do so on their own. If you are doing your job right, the first session will be more about drawing them out of their shell, and the last sessions will be more about answering whatever questions that have. They will be a bigger part of the dialogue towards the last sessions.

Meticulously. Sometimes students think they are weak in one area that are strong in and strong in one they are actually weak in. It's important to balance their own perceived needs with their actual needs. Go through the lessons they are in at school. Make sure they understand everything.

You can usually tell within a session, or maybe two, what areas they are strong in. You can focus on the others ones. Usually students will tell you, "I already know this," and then you can confirm it. If they do, then move on. If they don't, explain them to why. The process is pretty organic. You'd have to actually try really hard to ignore their weakness and focus on their strengths. The natural thing is for students to ask for help or unknowingly signal they need help in one area or another.

Pen, paper and verbal communication. If a student responds better to a whiteboard, then I'll do that. I always have a laptop in case I need to reference some source on the Internet or to quickly type something up or look at a pre-written quiz I've made. I like to do verbal quizzes. It's a good way to make sure the student feels confident in an area. I use notecards a lot too if needed.