What is your teaching philosophy?

You can't teach everything to everyone and true learning requires many different types of knowledge. I use multiple methods of teaching (linguistic, visual, auditory) to speak to students.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

While guidance from a teacher is important to keeping kids on task and motivated, allowing students to have some choice and control over what happens in the classroom is actually one of the best ways to keep them engaged. For example, allowing students to choose the type of assignment they do or which problems to work on can give them a sense of control that may just motivate them to do more.

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

I would see in which areas they were struggling with the most, and then I would try to do a mini-lesson or reteach that particular area. Then, I would give all of my students a redo of that assessment to see if there were any improvements.

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

The Question-Answer Relationship strategy (QAR) encourages students to learn how to answer questions better. Students are asked to indicate whether the information they used to answer questions about the text was textually explicit information (information that was directly stated in the text), textually implicit information (information that was implied in the text), or information entirely from the student's own background knowledge.

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

Check what their knowledge level is so far, and make an agenda based on that.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

By taking control of their own actions and questioning them on what I taught them so that I know if they did, in fact, understand it.