What is your teaching philosophy?

I believe that everyone learns differently. As a tutor, it is my responsibility to learn how a particular student learns best, and cater my teaching to each student individually.

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

I would talk to them and try to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are. I see where they are struggling and try to do some problems in that area, at a slow pace. I would do problems step by step, and examine how the student does at each step so that I learn what to focus on, what areas might need improvement, what areas are already solid, and how that student learns.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

In my tutoring, I always try to start with broad idea and then narrow our focus to more detailed concepts. The goal is to give the student a frame of reference where they can think, rationalize, and understand basic principles without any help. This way students are aware of where they might struggle, and what they need to do moving forward.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

One key thing is tracking a student's improvement, and making sure the student is aware of how much he or she has progressed. The learning process is often fast-paced, and it can be easy to forget just how much you've learned, so I like to remind students from time to time of how much we've done. I also like for the students to have a lot of control over the lessons because they are the ones who need to learn. If a student is learning what he or she feels is important, there will be more motivation driving him or her.

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

In my experience, skills and concepts learned in school have multiple parts to them, and students often get stuck on learning one or two parts of a skill. I try to handle problems and examples step by step and ask the student a lot of questions so I am aware of what specific parts of a problem they struggle with, and I make sure to focus a lot on those parts. I also ask for feedback throughout the lesson to see if the things we are covering are actually being understood.

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

The key thing with students who are struggling with reading comprehension is to identify if they are struggling with specific words in a passage, or putting the entire passage in context. For the former problem, as a tutor I would lead the student to learning what a certain word means by highlighting context clues. For the latter problem, I would break the given passage into smaller parts and take notes on the small parts of the passage, and then use the notes to get a full context of the meaning of the passage.