What is your teaching philosophy?

I believe that every student has the right to a quality education and access to the knowledge and skills needed to be successful. The teacher's role is to guide students throughout the learning process with empathy, patience, and wisdom.

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

I think it's important for a student to feel very comfortable with his or her tutor, so we would spend some time getting to know each other. The first session would involve a discussion about where a student needs help, and we would build from there towards a plan for success!

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

Students grow in confidence when they begin to see little successes along the way. This only works, however, when these successes are truly a result of a student's own work. I help students organize their thinking and learning processes, thus enabling them to become more independent in their studies.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

We will establish clear expectations and an action plan during tutoring sessions. These short-term goals will have direct results, which aids in motivation. I will also follow up between sessions.

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

It's very important that students feel comfortable admitting they are struggling. Once we have established where the difficulty is, we take the problem step by step. When a student begins to struggle, we go back and take those steps again. This repetition does not mean failure! It means we are really taking the time to fully understand and comprehend the material. We can repeat this process for as long as we need to in order to ensure the student has fully grasped the concepts.

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

Reading out loud is a very important part of the process of reading comprehension, and that would definitely be a part of our work. Reading and language are a series of steps, and I work with students to figure out where they may have missed out on learning one of these steps. We move forward from there!

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

Communicating openly and honestly about where he or she is struggling is a really important place to start. From that point, we set very concrete goals and clear steps along the way towards achieving those goals.

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

The most important thing to remember with any school subject is that somehow, some way, somewhere, it really DOES have something to do with our lives! Making a correlation between a difficult subject or topic and how it connects with our lives is a very important step in engaging students.