Kim

What is your teaching philosophy?

I believe that asking questions is the best way to learn anything. Knowledge that you work for is far more durable and meaningful than knowledge that is handed to you. I work with my students to teach them how to ask the questions that will elicit the answers they're looking for, whether it’s the appropriate grammar for a sentence, or the hidden meaning within a work of literature.

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

My number one priority with my students is to make sure that they feel comfortable with me. The relationship between a tutor and a student needs to be honest - a student can't hide what they're having trouble with. I'd spend a portion of our first session together just getting to know one another. Getting students talking about their likes or interests, in my experience, creates a friendlier, collegial atmosphere. Only after we are comfortable with each other would be begin working on the task at hand.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

As I mentioned in my previous answer, I believe asking questions is the best way to learn anything. As a result, I'm convinced that teaching students how to ask questions - and how to ask the right questions - is the key to creating independent learners. While working with students, I continually prompt them to questions their assumptions. We follow their questions to the appropriate answers. If those answers aren't what we're looking for, we go back to the question and tweak it, always keeping in mind what we're looking for. By teaching students how to ask questions, and how to strategize their way to the answer, the student is honing the skills essential for any independent learner.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

In my classrooms, I've noticed that it's difficult to keep my students' attention for long stretches of time. Research has shown that you can hold a person's attention for 10 minutes. After that, even an adult's mind will start to wander. As a result, I've made a habit of creating short, engaging lessons that don't exceed that ten-minute mark. If my student is engrossed in the task, we continue with it beyond the allotted time. If my student looks bored, we switch to something else. There are dozens of ways to teach the same concepts. The key is finding the ways that work for each individual student.

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

If one of my students was having difficulty with a skill or concept, I'd first make sure the confusion wasn't a result of the way I was explaining it. Just as different teaching techniques work on different students, different explanations are also sometimes necessarily. If the difficulty didn't come from my explanation, I would create a lesson that builds up to that concept, providing my student with the steps they need to get to the concept in question. By breaking a concept down to its component parts, the task of grasping it becomes less intimidating for the student. An additional benefit of scaffolding lessons is that it provides me with the opportunity to see exactly where - what facet of a concept - a student struggles with.

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

Summary Notes - a guided note sheet that asks students to identify what they're reading, ask various types of questions about the text, and to predict what they believe will happen next - are an incredible resource for students struggling with reading comprehension. Additionally, reading aloud to students struggling with reading comprehension often helps them gauge the meaning in the text. There are dozens of strategies, from acting out scenes to drawing a picture of a chapter, which helps students comprehend what they're reading. The particular technique I'd use would depend on the student's needs.