What is your teaching philosophy?

My goal is to empower the student to leverage their strengths and support the student in mastering new learning skills and problem-solving strategies

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

Get a sense of the student's personality, learning style, and comfort zone, while assessing the student's short- and long-term priorities. Then, we arrive at a mutually acceptable consensus on how to execute.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

By helping the student increase their confidence in problem-solving, using tools and strategies in a supported environment, eventually reducing the need for support.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

By helping the student maintain ownership of their priorities and goals.

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

Identify the cause of difficulty, attempt alternative path, reassess, and try again until an appropriate strategy is found.

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

By helping minimize performance anxiety and injecting some much needed sense of enjoyment and mastery into the process.

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

Build trust, get a clear sense of priorities, avoid imposing strategies, and act as a partner rather than a problem solver.

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

By helping find ways in which the subject is germane to the student rather than an abstraction. By finding ways to inject humor into a dour process.

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

Have the student teach back the material. Test the understanding with exercises or Q&A.

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

By helping the student learn that progress is incremental, and that all learning is a humbling experience but also a source of sense of mastery.

How do you evaluate a student's needs?

1) discuss student goals 2) review student assets available to meet these goals 3) needs are the delta between 1 and 2, and represent the area where a tutor will help bridge the gap

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

By tailoring my demeanor and my use of metaphoric language vs utilitarian speech, and by appealing to this or that trait of the student most likely to build trust and produce a productive learning environment.

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

It depends on the topic. I believe in light use of props. Speech, hands, a pencil, and scratch paper are enough for most situations.