What is your teaching philosophy?

The student holds the pencil! It's my job to help you learn to learn, not just to give you answers. Digging into the work yourself (with guidance from me where needed) will help you feel more accomplished, and teach you skills that you can apply throughout your life!

What might you do in a typical first session with a student?

Talk and get to know each other. You tell me what you want to get out of our time together. Where you do think you excel? Where do you want to improve? What are your current study habits? I want to get a broad picture of you as a student to see where we're starting, and figure out where we want to go so we can map out a plan to get there together.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

By letting you hold the pencil! I'm not a book of answers; I'm a tool to help keep you focused and encouraged, suggest new approaches to problem solving based on my experience, and offer new perspectives and self awareness so that the skills you learn with me can apply far beyond whatever subject we're working on at the moment.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

I like to balance a big picture focus and end goals with small, accomplishable pieces, and then track progress. Keeping your eye on the prize and being able to take real steps toward getting there in every session is encouraging! Tackling something new or something you struggle with can be a long and daunting road, but I'm here to walk it with you and show you the way!

If a student has difficulty learning a skill or concept, what would you do?

Varied approaches and breaking down the pieces - no two students think or learn the same. Just because I understand something one way doesn't mean everyone else will, too. Everything can be broken down into smaller pieces, and if we can identify the piece that the student is having trouble with, we can focus on finding a way to overcome that piece and start putting it back into the context of the larger skill or concept.

How do you help students who are struggling with reading comprehension?

Start small - let's find something you're interested in and read and talk together about it! Taking the formality and pressure out of reading can do a lot! It's something people do every day without realizing it. So let's start simple, building basic retention and comprehension skills by talking, and then build from there!

What strategies have you found to be most successful when you start to work with a student?

Listening to the student. I find most students aren't used to being asked where they're struggling, or what works best for them, or treating learning and tutoring as a cooperative process. When they can see that I'm a tool for them to use, they are put in control of their learning and experience, which is how it should be! My goal as a tutor is to no longer be needed as a tutor. Putting the student in the driver seat and letting me guide and step in only as necessary has changed so many of my students' entire perspective on school and education.

How would you help a student get excited/engaged with a subject that they are struggling in?

By showing them they *can* do it, being understanding that struggling in a subject makes it daunting, or that finding it not interesting is ok - but making it doable, being excited about the students progress (even if not the subject), and keeping a positive, engaged, and "we're in this together" attitude can go a long way to help students keep wading through challenging subjects.

What techniques would you use to be sure that a student understands the material?

Once I'm confident a student understands the work they're doing - I have them teach it to me! If you can't teach someone else what you're doing (or at least walk them through the steps), you likely don't understand it as well as you think. So we swap roles! This technique can also be very revealing of where a student is truly excelling, and where they may still be struggling.

How do you evaluate a student's needs?

Talking to them, setting goals, working on problems/projects together, and watching them work.

How do you adapt your tutoring to the student's needs?

The great thing about my philosophy as a tutor is that the whole point is for the student to become a more self-aware learner! I don't go into a session with a new student with any expectations or plans. Let's dig into the material, and through trial and error and experimenting with different approaches, figure out together what works and what doesn't. I won't always immediately have all the answers for what works for every student, but if we can figure that out together, we'll both learn something.

What types of materials do you typically use during a tutoring session?

That depends entirely on the student's needs and the type of learner they are, and what we're working on. For hands-on learners, I'm coming armed with worksheets, problems to solve, books, and whatever is applicable to what we're studying; for visual learners, break out the highlighters and charts!