Finlay Turner-Trott

100+ hours tutoring A-Level physics and maths to two different students.
1 year teaching SEN and rehab groups horticulture.
1 year educating primary school children on basic medical knowledge

I normally ask for a 15 minute free phone call prior to lessons commencing to assess where your student is and would like to be academically. After that, lessons will be focused on building enthusiasm for studying the subjects, improving on the weaker spots of the students abilities and exceeding their academic goals.

The lesson structure varies. For example, one past student was having lessons during summer holidays to get ahead on the content for the final year of A-levels. So, in lessons we would approach new topics and consolidate on them but the most important thing for this particular student was building confidence and problem solving skills. Within the first 3 lessons, we established that they could easily repeat a method after seeing it done 10 minutes beforehand but when asked several lessons later to solve the same problem, they would initially say "I don't know." By the end of the summer holidays, he had the confidence to begin attempting a question, the ability to assess whether it was going in a favourable direction and then either stop and change the approach or carry on with the correct approach. He'd even find himself getting excited when a formula he knew appeared out of the algebra and the rest of the problem was like the end of a solitaire game - just putting things in their rightful place.

Another student was learning whilst also attending school. Most of our time was spent going over what she had not already understood from her school lessons. Often, she would show me her attempt at a question and I'd give her a clue so she could go through her working line by line to find where the mistake was made (sometimes with further prompting). After this correction, I'd create several more questions where the same mistake was easy to make and very occasionally throw in one that invites another kind of mistake - just to keep her on her toes! We also developed strategies like putting an equals sign at the beginning of lines of working where it is implied to remind her that if she does something to one side of the equation, she better be doing it to the other!

Both the above students were very different in their approaches - the first liked to derive everything in terms of basic fundamentals e.g work only with sin and cos then shape it into the form required in the end. Whereas the second student preferred to use equations on the formula sheet wherever possible. Obviously, I would adapt my prompts to take them down the easiest route for them.

Teaching SEN, rehab groups and primary school children gave me lots of experience teaching a very wide variety of people and developed my skill of quickly assessing how someone learns and how to make the process enjoyable for them. Ways I achieve this can be asking them seemingly impossible questions with frustratingly obvious answers, pushing them far out of their comfort zone to do things they are very much capable of, maintaining an enthusiastic approach during seemingly mundane tasks and not pushing the student too far every single time.