What is your teaching philosophy?

My teaching philosophy revolves around speaking to students' strengths and building flexible understanding of fundamentals.

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

During a first session, it is important to gauge the student's level in whichever subject they want tutoring in. Testing progressively more difficult questions lets me decide what the student needs the most aid in and gives me an idea of what types of questions the student is responsive to.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

It's all about motivation! A student will naturally become more independent in his or her studies if there is a wider goal than simply learning individual units. Making the material relevant and helping encourage students to approach subjects from different angles can make even dry material have something of a personality.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

Stay away from strict drilling of the material. Although repetition does help hone a student's subject-specific reflexes, continuous drilling turns the drill itself into the point of focus. Variety in exercises can help keep students ready and willing to learn more. Switching up the atmosphere of studying can help keep material interesting.

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

Confusion and difficulty should be addressed simply by breaking down concepts to their most basic parts. Strengthening fundamentals and building a saturated understanding of them brings ideas into focus and establishes something of a "tool belt" for students to rely on when learning new concepts.

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

I like to break down material into small chunks and use each successfully learned skill as a stepping stone into the following concepts. Another very helpful exercise is to have the student try to create questions he or she thinks will give the tutor difficulty. This highlights what the student interprets as especially difficult. When a student can ask a good question, that's when I know I'm getting somewhere with them.

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

By helping to expand the student's productive vocabulary and teaching methods of breaking down and rephrasing initially opaque sentences and passages.

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

Having the student "teach" me the unit and formulate questions and their respective answers.

How do you build a student's confidence in a subject?

Demonstrate what the student already knows by having informal conversations about the subject, asking foundational questions, and having the student explain the answers back to me. Providing more tools than initially necessary is also a useful method, as the student can feel resourceful in understanding topics outside of the unit being worked on.

How do you evaluate a student's needs?

Asking the student what he/she is concerned with and what he/she is eager to learn. Based on those two questions, the student should be given questions or question topics to choose from. From there, a tutor can see where the student falls in the topics he/she feels most comfortable in, and from there, the topics more problematic to the student can be assessed.

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

I always use sheets of paper and a pencil. If teaching a language or reading (in person), I use something physical to help students visualize sentences or concepts (perhaps index cards instead for older kids). I used flashcards if I am ever tutoring a subject with important/unique vocabulary.

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

From the first meeting, my tutoring is based on how the student approaches a subject. For that reason, much of my tutoring style is student-run. If ever I need to alter my tutoring, I may change the language I use (more/less technical; more/less didactic), or the angle of teaching. That is, I may have to turn to more concrete ways to portray a topic. Perhaps, I may have to describe certain concepts in terms analogous to the particular interests of a student. It may be the case that I have to shift to a more tutor-run approach for students who are less organized or less comfortable leading the questions asked during a session.

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

The simplest method is to teach in terms of the particular interests of the student and provide examples in those terms. More generally, it is important to create a conversation about the topic at hand. Rather than approaching the subject simply as an academic hurdle, I try to explain to the student why I myself find the topic interesting and fun. Then I can teach the subject with those interesting aspects as springboards to hook the student into curiosity.