Tommy Lyons

My style to tutoring is focused on first helping the student with their approach to a subject before providing more of it. While education on new topics is an important factor of tutoring and something I provide, I find it essential to discuss with the student what they know and how they feel beforehand. Difficulties with academic subjects is not for lack of information - there's more than enough easy available - but in learning it, retaining it, and organising it in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming and that won't be forgotten quickly.

Initial stages of tutoring will deal with the student's interest in the subject, their emotions around it, and any stress they may be experiencing relating to it, to ensure the tutoring sessions remain a place to exhale and take stock instead of becoming an additional source of stress. Following this, we'll review what the student knows, what they're currently learning, and what they feel they have difficulty with. From this point on, lessons take a deeply individualised approach according to the students needs, but an emphasis is always maintained on not providing new information at a faster pace than it can be genuinely understood and integrated into one's understanding of psychology.

Having finished a bachelor's degree in applied psychology and currently preparing for a specialisation in clinical psychology, I'm familiar with the balancing act of learning and incorporating very different kinds of information from different areas of psychology simultaneously, from clinical to organisational to lifespan orientated, and working to understand them both as individually-assessed subjects and as pieces of psychology as a whole. Likewise, my mixed-methods bachelor's thesis requiring both quantitative and qualitative data collection/analysis, coupled with a scholarship-funded systematic review conducted independently between academic years, gives me a wide number of perspectives into psychological research.

Any assessments will be introduced only after initial stages of tutoring, and will be the product of communication and agreement between myself and the student.