What is your teaching philosophy?

It is the teacher's responsibility to explain a concept in terms the student can understand, and to ensure the student is always being challenged to grow.

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

Identify goals, and then identify: strong areas, weak areas, create a multi-week plan for improving weaknesses, and finding new ways to enhance strengths in order to reach the goal.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

Give advice on efficient ways to learn to read, write and speak in preparation for a top-tier university academic workload.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

Encourage the student to understand why he or she wants to achieve a goal.

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

Try to understand if the difficulty is due to lack of understanding of a more basic concept necessary to learn the skill in question; practice breaking down a complex problem into simpler components.

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

Read, read, read!

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

Identify key weaknesses, strengths and make a plan for consistent practice of simple skills to improve weaknesses integrated with practice of more complex skills using strengths.

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

I try to engage students by relating difficult theoretical concepts and skills to real-world situations using movies, TV, books and current events, placing seemingly dry subject matter in the wider context of daily life.

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

Frequent informal testing of small chunks of information, along with more spaced cumulative quizzes. Whenever I cover a new concept, I immediately ask a student to explain it back to me using his or her own words.

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

After ascertaining a student's skill in a subject area, I ask him or her to show his or her knowledge on easy problems, building confidence in already acquired knowledge and setting him or her up for the challenge of material that is still not mastered. I believe in the proximal zone theory of learning, whereby I challenge the student with problems not yet in his or her mastery, but not so difficult the student will be discouraged to continue learning.

How do you evaluate a student's needs?

The best way to evaluate is to ask the student directly what he or she expects out of the tutoring and what he or she wants/needs to achieve. Speaking to parents provides a different perspective on the student, supplementing what the student tells me.

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

Tutoring is not about dragging a student by the hand to mastery of new skills. Rather it is about opening the door to greater mastery and encouraging the student to walk through it of his or her own accord. Using this philosophy, my job is to make sure that the open doorway is the right one (i.e. I understand what the student needs) and providing the support to enable the student to walk through on his or her own, whereby the student achieves a sense of self-efficacy and pride at having achieved academic excellence independently.

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

I use sample questions, reading excerpts, book lists, strategy guides, prep books and any materials provided by the student.