What is your teaching philosophy?

I believe in interactive teaching and learning! Teaching is about highlighting and improving your students' strengths to position them for success. My tutoring/teaching styles cater to various types of learners, and makes teaching and learning an exciting task rather than a boring session.

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

I would use a first session with a student to get to know one another--examine the student's likes and dislikes, discuss areas of strength and weakness, and craft a plan for future sessions together.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

Helping students become independent learners is centralized around an idea of boosting confidence; a confident student is a successful student. Independent learners are students who are empowered and enter all sessions with an open mind and are ready to learn.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

Helping a student stay motivated is about setting concrete and achievable goals between session. This way a student stays motivated between sessions, and working through anything that they might be having difficulty with in tutoring only reinforces this hard work and confidence.

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

There are always many ways to work through a given concept! If a student is struggling to understand something conceptually, I would bring different teaching methods to the table. Examples of this might include manipulative, video lectures, visual aids, or real-world examples.

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

I have lots of strategies to help students struggling with reading comprehension. Some examples of these are as follows: sentence breakdowns, reading for general ideas, searching for context clues, and reading between the lines.

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

The strategy that I've found most successful when starting to work with a student is to really getting to know them. I think it's important to learn the background that each student is coming from in order to see how to best help them.

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

I think exciting and engaging a student in a subject in which they are struggling is also rooted in boosting confidence! In my experience, when students gain confidence in what they're doing, their work generally improves. This is especially true in middle and high school students. To work on confidence, I would start with easier problems that utilize the same concepts or techniques as the work that the student is struggling with, and grow our work from there.

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

I would use short quizzes as benchmarks for understanding, and ask students to explain back to me whatever concepts the material is covering.

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

As I mentioned earlier, I believe in boosting confidence through working through less challenging work with the same conceptual basis, and then moving onto more challenging problems as time goes on. This work would be reinforced with encouragement and support.

How do you evaluate a student's needs?

Evaluating a student's needs is based on a mixture of examining their strengths, weaknesses, and expressed goals.

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

In the past, I have changed the time of tutoring sessions to accommodate students, brought in manipulatives, talked with parents, and changed my teaching style to better fit that particular student's learning style.

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

I often use problems accessible online, literature, and visual aids during tutoring sessions.