What is your teaching philosophy?

I think it's important to be a good learner in order to be a good teacher. I think that motivation is key, and it's the instructor's job to make the material interesting and enticing.

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

Get to know each other, find out their interests and pay attention to their academic strengths and weaknesses. I think it's important to note these things, and I think every student is extremely unique and requires a wide array of accommodations in order to learn efficiently.

How can you help a student become an independent learner?

It's important for a student to learn the material that they're required to know, but it is also (if not more so) important for that student to learn how to learn. Figuring out how a particular student learns and helping the student to recognize and utilize this is important.

How would you help a student stay motivated?

Try to keep things relaxed! Enjoy a tangent or mental break from the subject material, and return with a different perspective. Students who feel overburdened may need encouragement, and simply helping a student recognize their own abilities can give them more confidence, and more motivation as a result.

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

I would try to make the concept more accessible to the student by making it easier to relate to, or try out various different methods until we find something that works.

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

Reading comprehension can be more difficult for some people than it is for others - I think teaching a student how to digest full sentences by truly reading each word in the sentence is key. Sometimes simply reading slowly but closely is enough to help some students, and sometimes teaching students to read with the proper inflection can help. Really getting a grasp for each sentence or parts of the sentence is very important, and making sure each idea is understood before reading ahead is very important as well as much of what is contained later in texts builds off what has already been said.

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

I think that probably one of the most important things is to figure out what the student wants to get out of the tutoring sessions, or try to figure out what the student really needs from the tutoring sessions. I think that every student is going to be quite different from any other student, and it is extremely important to learn how each student prefers to learn. Getting a grasp for how a particular student learns (and the things they're interested in) is really important and can be a very effective teaching method.

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

一个pproaching a subject with a different perspective can be really important when it comes to teaching a subject that the student finds uninteresting. Sometimes making the subject easier to relate to by understanding the student's own interests can help open up the door for exploration and curiosity.