Education should develop students' character, teach them to apply logic and reasoning to a variety of problems, and provide them with the skills and knowledge they need to achieve their future aspirations. To accomplish this goal, teachers should use instructional methods that will interest students and help them to remember and apply the content. Students must be challenged to evaluate information, summarize it, and clearly communicate well-reasoned thoughts about it. Teachers and tutors should intentionally integrate activities that build teamwork, critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills to prepare students for the workforce or higher education.

In a typical first session, I would assess the student's individual skill level in order to tailor my instruction to his or her personal needs. Then, I would discuss what goals the student and his or her parents had for the tutoring sessions and develop a plan for achieving those goals.

In my personal experience, slowly giving students greater and greater personal responsibility for learning helps them to become independent learners. For example, if a student had poor reading comprehension, we would study the content together in the second tutoring session. I would model good reading techniques, explain how to do it and why, and have the student copy me. In future sessions, the student would slowly be encouraged to apply these skills more and more until he or she had mastered them.