Stanley Cobley

I have around 1 year of tutoring experience, mostly online and in groups of up to three students. I aim to make my sessions as interactive and engaging for the students as possible, while also tailoring the content and teaching style to the learning styles and needs of the students. Most sessions begin with an opening discussion of what they know about the lesson topic and what they find particularly interesting about it. To follow on from that, I tend to create an activity (usually discussion-based) prompting the students to demonstrate their knowledge surrounding the wider topic. Sometimes the sessions can be more activity and discussion-based, while on other occasions, such as when the students need guidance with exam technique, I prompt the students to plan and prepare answers to questions from past papers. This is done by testing the student's knowledge of the question types that they will encounter in an exam, and by prompting them to suggest an approach to answering them. Sometimes, I suggest an approach better suited to answering a question type based on the mark scheme and I then prompt the students to plan an answer based on that. I think that planning answers within a session fosters a level of discussion which allows students to demonstrate their knowledge in an engaging way, rather than simply writing. The session usually concludes with a reflection of what the students have learned and how they feel about the subject area. I leave them with two questions - "what is something new which you have learned?" and "what would you like to research more?".