Paul C.

Teaching experience

After the first 5 years of my teaching career, I moved to Dubai for a year, where I first started tutoring, initially focussing on Key Stage 3 and GCSE maths. When I started my job at my current independent school in the UK in 2002, I continued to focus mainly on maths tutoring, Over the past 10 years, since changing to a part-time teaching contract, I have been able to do more tutoring, including using my skill and experience as Head of Department to tutor Business Studies. I have built up considerable experience tutoring online (in addition to face to face) , mainly by using Zoom and Teams platforms. This has allowed greater flexibility for the timings of lessons and also allowed students from different counties to access my GCSE and A-level expertise. I have also helped to tutor maths to SEND students or other neurodivergent students who are home schooled, or are not attending school all the time due to other personal/family reasons.

Approach

I have a patient, friendly approach to tutoring which has been very successful over the years and I enjoy sharing my knowledge and passion for maths and business studies, taking great pride and satisfaction in helping students to reach their full potential. The best way I have found to teach or tutor is to focus on building confidence in my students. I understand that many topics can often be very challenging, but my aim is to make students feel comfortable approaching any question that they are faced with. Methods of tutoring I use include using examples, to make sure students understand the content first, and supporting this with notes, videos and explanations. Then, I like to work through questions together so I can offer guidance when needed, before finally getting the students to complete questions independently. Of course I am able to be very flexible to adapt my teaching and resources to whatever works for the individual's learning needs/style and areas of weakness.