What is your teaching philosophy?

Create a concrete plan, coach along the way, solidify your personal mistakes, and measure closely your improvement.

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

Get a sense of your background, strengths and weaknesses, your goals, your time frame, and then go through some problems to see your thought process. We will tackle one of your problem areas during the first session and create a plan of attack for the rest of our working relationship.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

Asking questions and allowing you to learn how to think through the problems. I give you the tools to ask the right questions for yourself.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

I help a student stay motivated by the improvement, wins, and increase in scores you will see as you work with me.

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

Everyone has difficulty with some skill or concept. The key is to never give up, but don't be stubborn about it. Try different angles of thinking, approaches to solving the problem or learning the concept, and keep at it until something clicks, because something inevitably will.

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

Practice and guidance. Reading comprehension is a learned skill that comes continuous, long term practice. There are many tips and ways to accelerate the learnings you can have from reading, and I will share with them these tips.

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

To get a student excited and engaged with a subject that they are struggling with, we take them through the psychological steps of "recovery." We take the subject and do a diagnostic. See what the numbers are saying about the subject and how much the student is struggling. The student is made to feel unembarrassed about this, and guided to look at this not personally but objectively. Then, we tackle subsections of this subject and get good at small subsections. These small wins build encouragement and confidence. With this momentum, these aggregated smaller subsections will allow the student get over the mental hurdle of the subject they struggle with.

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

I use cheat sheets that the student makes him/herself that allow the student to write down common mistakes that student has made in the past. Then, every consecutive session, we review the previous sessions topics with different questions to see if she/he learned the material.

How do you evaluate a student's needs?

I evaluate the student's needs by first understanding the history of the student's interaction with the subject. After understanding how long the student has been struggling with the subject, I ask for a diagnostic test to be completed to understand how much need there is. Then I divide these results and analyze them for different topic areas to focus on.

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

Each person has a different learning method. Many students have not learned yet how they learn most effectively. Mostly because they have not put in the time to learn that. I try different methods of teaching to see what sticks the best, and then try and emphasize that type of teaching method in future sessions.

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

Firstly, we use homework sets and go over incorrect problems. I pinpoint certain problems that are good transitions for the topic I would like to cover that day, and then use copious materials and problems sets at my disposal to practice the concepts from easy to hard.

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

Strategies that are most successful when starting to work with a student is learning what makes the student motivated and how their thinking works. Understanding why the student wants to achieve their goal helps me understand how much initiative the student will take in learning. When the student takes initiative in learning, the student learns much faster than me prescribing specific work and plans. However, if the student is not as self-motivated, I must be much more prescriptive.

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

I build a student's confidence in a subject by allowing the student to feel the impact of our sessions. I start off with a diagnostic, which shows roughly the status of their subject strength. Then, each week (or whatever interval), the student is guided to taking tests that will show increases or decreases in time. The specific problem sets that they do will also be measured, and the increase allows the student to become more confident.