Tutoring Approach

I take a patient and empathetic approach. I listen to my students and tailor my approach to suit their needs. I aim to build confidence, reducing uncertainty and anxiety to ensure that learning is secure and a solid foundation of knowledge and skills is built. In the short-term, this makes students feel more comfortable studying mathematics, and in the long-term prepares them well for exams and future study.

I regularly set homework to be completed between sessions. This gives students the opportunity to check whether they fully understood the content of the latest session and practise key techniques. It also let's me know whether we can move on or need to revise a particular topic to fill a gap in knowledge.

To start with, we will focus on a small number of topics in each tutorial, where topics are chosen by the student to address areas where they are least confident. The structure of the sessions may involve me doing some direct teaching to revise or review a topic, but most of the time is spent looking at a range of questions (some exam-style) where the student attempts to answer it and I help them (1) get the right answer and (2) write it in the style expected by exam markschemes.

Closer to exams, sessions focus on past exam papers. Typically, students are given an exam paper to attempt in timed conditions between sessions, then we discuss their attempt in the next session. These sessions are crucial for optimising exam performance, as students build familiarity with the exam format and stucture, and also with what high-quality solutions look like.