My lessons' format would be strongly based on the student's own needs and interests. It could be very easy for me to just read the textbook for an hour and leave some homework to you. But it's not proper and effective language teaching, at least in my view. My own experience reminded me that personal interest and usage are both main points. Let's take an example. Imagine a student who wants to learn Chinese because he/she is interested in Chinese cultures. In this case, during a one-hour class, I will follow the standard procedures in the first half an hour while dedicating the remaining time to teaching some idioms, reading some poems, or talking about some histories. It will be much easier for students to learn Chinese from these contents. The contents can be very flexible. Maybe one day, the student finds a Chinese BF/GF and wants to date in Chinese. Fantastic! I can arrange some useful sentences in the scenario.
Students who have commercial or academic needs for using Chinese make no difference. If you just want to chat with your Chinese counterpart, we can focus on practicing speaking language and don't need to deal with the somewhat disturbing Chinese characters.
My goal of teaching Chinese is quite ideal but simple: happy learning. I improved my English through reading books which I am interested in, and chatting with some lovely friends. I hope anyone who choose me as the Chinese tutor can feel happy after lessons, just like after chatting with a friend.