Andrew

I have always enjoyed an active life such as going to the tennis court, maintaining the garden and allotment and ordering seeds and completing several watercolours. I attend church regularly and get involved in facilitating youth groups and volunteer treasurer at a charity organisation.

Tutoring Experience

I have had a long and varied career but still learning, online teaching is relatively new but I have been developing my skill set with using computer based teaching. Most of my career has been in teaching History to all levels in a variety of settings. I introduced the innovative Schools Council History project as it was so ambitious and actually asked and answered what history was supposed to do in schools. When confronted with the problem of preparing students for an exam on use of sources with an unknown topic I enlisted as an examiner. This has helped considerably in my successful exam results and I have continued until recently in examining GCSE History and the same in a variety of A level papers.
English teaching began with supply and some longer term contracts, mostly up to GCSE. With more junior teaching there has been more English, covering KS1 to KS2. At two junior schools, I was employed to improve outcomes for year six pupils in their SAT’s exams. This was with individuals or small groups which gave me the chance to build up relationships to develop learning. The same is true for tutoring which I began about ten years ago with home visits, mostly to children needing help with GCSE English. Obviously this entailed selecting material suited to their topics and ability and aptitude.

Tutoring Approach

My approach is to seek to coax children to form their own views and the ability to express them. This helps in the short term with exams but lays the foundation for long term learning. For most this is impossible without structured learning. Usually a key question, broken down into smaller topics which combine to answer the question. Sometimes, especially in English, this can be generated by children themselves in response to a poem or text but it will still require specific guidance such as a historical context or a list of literary terms to analyse a text. After that it will still need some teacher intervention in the form of questions or guidance requiring some insight on the part of the teacher.