What is your teaching philosophy?

Adapting a session to real-life context or, especially, to one of the student's interests brings value to the subject matter. Without that, math is just a bunch of alien symbols and numbers.

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

I'd get to know them as a person--their interests and hobbies, their likes and dislikes about the subject they are learning. This helps in developing the best approach to start the session as well as the formulation of a plan for further sessions down the line.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

Helping a student develop a mentality to have when they approach problems is key. They can have a skill taught to them, but it's self-communication that allows them to remember and apply it (i.e., a personalized acronym for problem-solving steps or an interpretive guideline for looking at a problem in a different way, which may even relate to a different subject altogether). Each case is unique.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

Encouragement - distract them from their mistakes with other successes. Small checkpoints of success (even just one step completed in a different problem) remind a student of their ability and allow them to revisit their struggles with a fresh mindset.

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

We would try with a different approach and if that doesn't work--move on! Success feeds off of success, so we need to find another problem to draw forth a sense of achievement. Then, we would definitely return to that concept to enforce the student's fortitude in the face of difficulty.

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

Students who struggle with reading comprehension often rush through the material, reading the words and ideas, but not putting them together. Slow reading with the mastery of sentences first quickly turns into a student looking and grabbing onto the essential parts of sentences, paragraphs, and then overall passages.

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

Getting to know them. When I know the student, I can speak their "language;" meaning I can communicate ideas in a way that they can understand, and then translate back into the vernacular of the subject matter.

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

Explain the topic in terms of a different subject that the student might enjoy or comprehend more easily.