Nick Howell

I believe that careful listening, good technical knowledge and problem-solving skills, and a positive approach to learning are all important aspects of tutoring. Without these, a student is likely to have a poor learning experience where they don’t feel encouraged and make little progress.
An example of where I feel I demonstrated these qualities well during my independent tutoring with a student with autism was while going over some circle trigonometry questions; I noticed the student was not confident rearranging equations, and often made errors. As a part of maths that comes up in most areas of the course, I thought it was important to improve his ability and understanding in this area before continuing. I wrote some example questions for him to complete which each contained different situations that one might come across when rearranging an equation; any solutions that I demonstrated myself, I made sure to often ask the student to tell me what they thought was the appropriate next step, in order to test how well they were following my teaching. This helped me know when to repeat certain concepts and when to change my pace for the student. As a consequence, the student was able to rearrange equations much more quickly and accurately, while better understanding the methods they were using.