What is your teaching philosophy?

Briefly, my teaching philosophy has two parts. The first involves teaching students how to learn effectively. There are a variety of effective study techniques and processes that are not widespread knowledge. The second involves cultivating students' intuition. The goal is that they will be able to understand and solve a variety of problems using what they learned in the sessions, even if that problem is beyond the classroom.

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

First, I like to get to know the student. It is important for me to know the student's learning style, likes/dislikes about the subject at hand, likes/dislikes about school and learning in general, and so on. Once we know what we want to solve, we can outline a plan of action that will help achieve this goal. After that, we can get to the learning!

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

There are three distinct stages that can be improved on: reading, studying, and approaching problems. By giving students particular techniques for these areas, they will have a broad foundation that they can apply to many aspects of their education.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

Most importantly, I would be upbeat and encouraging. If they seem to hit a mental block, I would ask small questions to break through it and get back on track. By answering the questions, students actually lead themselves out of the mental block; I am just the instigator. If it is a problem topic, I would change the way I discuss the topic until we find a strategy that works.

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

First, I perform a a gap analysis. We need to identify where the lapse in understanding is. Once this is identified, we can specifically work on that aspect until we have accomplished the task. If one way of approaching the problem does not work, we can switch to a variety of other approaches or problem formulations.

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

There are specific techniques to improve reading comprehension at all levels of granularity (sentence, paragraph, chapter, etc.). The techniques get the student to notice the key details. Additionally, the techniques help students deal with the overall meaning and concepts of the content.