My teaching philosophy is that it is my job to guide students from the skills and knowledge they already possess to the abilities and goals that are beyond their reach. I do this through supporting them with the skills and strategies they need to slowly master more and more difficult challenges, while I slowly pull back my support until students can work independently at a higher level than they started.

Before a first session, I check in with students or parents to find out what they feel their goals and needs are for tutoring. I use this information to choose assessments that will teach me about a student's strengths, needs, self-concept, motivation, and ability level. By using effective, appropriate assessments in the first session, I can make better, more informed overall goals and lesson plans in subsequent sessions.

Almost every instructional strategy I use is geared toward helping students become independent learners, but a very effective strategy I use constantly is scaffolding. Scaffolding is the idea of the tutor working as the support system a student needs to be able to work just above where he/she could comfortably work independently. At this level, I provide various types of support and help to teach the student skills, knowledge, and strategies necessary for harder work, and then slowly pull away that support until he/she can do the work independently. This process not only helps a student get through one test or one piece of homework, but also teaches the student how to approach difficult tasks or problems in any situation.

In most tutoring scenarios, I don't believe that using external means of motivation is particularly helpful to nurturing a love of learning and ability to work independently in students. I prefer to give students the tools to unlock their own intrinsic motivation. Examples of this include giving positive feedback whenever possible, helping students set themselves up with habits that improve concentration and focus, and talking with students about what to do when they are tired, frustrated, bored, etc. while trying to learn.

Whenever a student has difficulty with a skill or concept, I backtrack to see what the underlying cause(s) of that difficulty may be. I check the student's understanding of background skills and concepts necessary to the new skill or concepts through open-ended questions, and help the student fill in any gaps in knowledge or abilities before returning back to the new concept. Additionally, I try to have multiple ways of presenting any skill or concept, and would work to find the instructional method that would best suit the particular learner I was working with.

When students struggle with reading comprehension, I assess how they are doing with all the skills and knowledge they need in order to devote mental time and space to comprehending a text. If a student were still struggling to pronounce unfamiliar words, we would work on word-solving strategies. If a student seems to have trouble with fluency, we would practice reading at a good pace with prosody. Whatever the various other needs that might be informing a student's comprehension struggles, I would model good comprehension strategies through read-alouds and paired reading with the student. Many students don't naturally realize they need to think about their own thinking when they read. Checking reactions to the text, learning to self-monitor comprehension, and making and checking predictions are all cognitive strategies that many students don't naturally acquire. By modeling them for the student, asking the student questions which teach him/her comprehension strategies, and addressing other reading issues during the guided reading process, I work to help the student synthesize all the skills and knowledge needed to comprehend a text well.