What is your teaching philosophy?

My learning philosophy is that students learn best when they construct their knowledge themselves. To that end, I try to guide students to the right answer, with questions and problems designed to help them discover the concept in question.

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

I like to jump right in so students can get a handle on my teaching style and determine if it will be a good fit. The main difference for my first sessions will be that I ask a few more questions and engage in more conversation so that we can get to know each other and start building up a sense of trust, which I find to be very important for a successful tutoring relationship.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

My teaching philosophy revolves around the idea of students constructing their knowledge themselves. Implicit in this method is students practicing teaching themselves. In addition, in order to ensure that the content we go over and the content the student is exposed to in class match up, I try to utilize the student's own notes and textbook, and while I do this, I narrate what I'm doing. This process of using the same resources that the student has models skills that a student can later use on their own to help them develop as independent learners.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

The first strategy I use is positive reinforcement. Every student I encounter is doing something right, and I always try to point those things out, especially with students who have lost their confidence. The second strategy is keeping our lessons light hearted and fun. I think many struggling students associate the classroom with stress and disappointment, causing demotivation. I strive to counteract this by creating new associations between the material and the experience of fun and discovery during my lessons.

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

The first methods that are always available to me are presenting material with a highly visual approach (graphs, drawings, etc.), a highly verbal/linguistic approach (enumerated procedures, definitions, metaphor, etc.) and hybrid approaches (concept maps, classification diagrams, etc.). If these approaches don't work during a lesson, I will try to gather materials for demonstrations for a kinesthetic or spatial approach, or digital media for a musical or artistic approach to the material that the student can study after the lesson or during our next lesson. As I mainly teach physics and math, these subjects lend themselves to direct connections to a student's own interests, which is often enough to engage their intuition and help them overcome the obstacles they encounter.

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

I tend to follow the guidelines of the SIOP teaching model for ELLs. The main strategy I use is a focus on general academic vocabulary, not just the vocabulary related to the current topic. To support this explicit approach to vocabulary, I will direct students towards readings that use this vocabulary if needed. Lastly, discussion is built into each of my lessons, and to this end I always encourage students to use not only topic specific vocabulary and grammatical constructions, but also those of general academic language. For most students at the level I teach, this is enough, but as a future teacher I have additional methods and training I can utilize if these methods prove to be insufficient.