I believe in interactive teaching and learning! Teaching is about highlighting and improving your students' strengths to position them for success. My tutoring/teaching styles cater to various types of learners, and makes teaching and learning an exciting task rather than a boring session.

I would use a first session with a student to get to know one another--examine the student's likes and dislikes, discuss areas of strength and weakness, and craft a plan for future sessions together.

Helping students become independent learners is centralized around an idea of boosting confidence; a confident student is a successful student. Independent learners are students who are empowered and enter all sessions with an open mind and are ready to learn.

Helping a student stay motivated is about setting concrete and achievable goals between session. This way a student stays motivated between sessions, and working through anything that they might be having difficulty with in tutoring only reinforces this hard work and confidence.

There are always many ways to work through a given concept! If a student is struggling to understand something conceptually, I would bring different teaching methods to the table. Examples of this might include manipulative, video lectures, visual aids, or real-world examples.

I have lots of strategies to help students struggling with reading comprehension. Some examples of these are as follows: sentence breakdowns, reading for general ideas, searching for context clues, and reading between the lines.

The strategy that I've found most successful when starting to work with a student is to really getting to know them. I think it's important to learn the background that each student is coming from in order to see how to best help them.

I think exciting and engaging a student in a subject in which they are struggling is also rooted in boosting confidence! In my experience, when students gain confidence in what they're doing, their work generally improves. This is especially true in middle and high school students. To work on confidence, I would start with easier problems that utilize the same concepts or techniques as the work that the student is struggling with, and grow our work from there.

I would use short quizzes as benchmarks for understanding, and ask students to explain back to me whatever concepts the material is covering.

As I mentioned earlier, I believe in boosting confidence through working through less challenging work with the same conceptual basis, and then moving onto more challenging problems as time goes on. This work would be reinforced with encouragement and support.

Evaluating a student's needs is based on a mixture of examining their strengths, weaknesses, and expressed goals.

In the past, I have changed the time of tutoring sessions to accommodate students, brought in manipulatives, talked with parents, and changed my teaching style to better fit that particular student's learning style.

I often use problems accessible online, literature, and visual aids during tutoring sessions.