As an educator, I have a passion to see my students' academic growth. I live for those "Aha!" moments! In order to get my students to that point, I believe that I must meet the student where he or she starts and move from there. Although it can be difficult with an entire class of students, I strive to make each student's educational experience as individualized as possible. This requires me to keep the lines of communication open, conduct lessons and require assignments that are meaningful and relevant to the students, and cater to various learning styles. I want to reach every student and see every student succeed. I'm a strong advocate of competency-based and project based learning, believing that students learn at their own pace and need to be able to apply the concepts in order to most effectually understand and retain the information.

During my first session with a student, I try my best to get to know the student-not just as a client, but as an individual with his or her own learning style and worthwhile interests. In addition to this, I try to gather information about the student's academic needs from his or her perspective, and I try to informally assess their areas of needs and strengths.

In my experience I have noticed that in order to help a student become an independent, lifelong learner requires that I individualize their instruction, allow them opportunities to connect the concepts to their lives and the real world, and tap into their interests and involve aspects in the lesson plans and tasks that include points of interest for the student. Once motivated and able to see the relevance of what they are learning, students tend to be more interested in learning more. In addition to this, during the course of teaching I make sure that students have as much hands-on opportunities with the material as possible. Rather than my being the sage on the stage and telling the student to do this or think this, I involve the student in the learning process as much as possible.

I help students stay motivated by first getting to know them as individuals, and showing genuine and sincere interest in them--their interests, likes and dislikes, and hobbies. I also learn how they most effectively learn and what instructional strategies may work most effectually for the student. I then try to include what I know about the student in my plans and activities. If I know of something that the student can do or read that touches on the student's interests, I can most often keep the student's attention and keep his/her motivation level up.

I try my best to get to the root and heart of the issue by looking at formal assessment results, if available, administering informal assessments with the student, and simply talking with the student about his/her challenges and what he/she believes maybe causing the disconnect. After the issue/s is uncovered, I try to create and conduct an instructional plan that is individualized to the student's academic needs.

As with every student, no matter their subject area challenges, I assess them. Depending on the student's grade level and his/her particular challenges with their reading comprehension, I move from there. For instance, many middle school students struggle in their comprehension with nonfiction texts. If working with such a student, I would pick sample, grade-appropriate, nonfiction texts that are focused on topics that interest the student, as well as pull texts that he/she will see in his/her class. We would work through the text together, highlighting key points and features, making note of key text features, practicing chunking the text and summarizing the text. These instructional reading methods are often effective for students who have issues comprehending this type of text.

When beginning my work with new students, I like to first get to know them personally--what are their interests, their hobbies, their thoughts and feelings about school, etc. I tell a bit about myself as well, in an effort to form a sense of camaraderie and establish a personal, human connection, which is sometimes difficult in an online setting. After that, I conduct an informal assessment based on the information that I have gathered about the student's academic needs, strengths and weaknesses. From that point we work as a team to tackle their weak points based upon an instructional plan that I have formed with my gathered information about the student.