Belinda K

I have been tutoring for five years alongside sixth form, my medical studies and my current role in M&A due to how much I really enjoy helping students to improve in the subjects that they are struggling with, or that they would like to push themselves further in. I try to encourage a really positive, confidence-boosting environment no matter what level my students are starting from. I focus on maintaining a growth mindset and it has previously helped to increase student grades. I managed to achieve nine 9s and two 8s at GCSE following my dedication towards my studies. Similarly, I managed to achieve two A*s (Maths and Chemistry) and one A (Biology) at A Level, as well as an A* in my EPQ.

My experience of working with a variety of students means that I myself have learnt the best methods of teaching and I have honed in on tailoring the tutoring experience to the individual student. Whilst I do believe that there are some general methods that I believe would benefit the majority of students, I always try to adapt to the personalities and learning methods of each student to really bring the best out of them. In my general principles, I base my tuition on being active, such as active recall. I try to reduce the amount of passive revision as much as possible both inside the tutoring sessions as well as outside, with the advice I can provide the tutee with when it comes to revision. My goal is to equip my student with the confidence to break down what revision would look like and to see a more systematic approach. My goal is to allow my student to spend less time at their desk procrastinating during revision, with more efficient outcomes. I also very much welcome mistakes and I encourage my students to not be afraid to make them during the session as it's a learning curve and it is much better to make the mistakes now rather than in the exam!

I try to base my lessons on the individual student, so I like to start with a blank whiteboard and through the lesson, I work through my student's current thought processes, explain the actual concepts whilst also allowing my student to fill in blanks where logic would follow, before ending the session with exam practice questions. I developed this method over the two years of my tutoring as I first began with pre-filled PowerPoints and found that they did not seem to show much improvement in my students due to how much less individual the lessons felt to the varying learning paces. Instead, I focused on making a difference between learning in class and revising in tuition sessions to maximise the value of 1 to 1 tuition.

I have had experience with AQA, OCR and Edexcel as exam boards for my subjects. However, I am more than happy to use other exam boards given the diversity in exam boards I have covered thus far.

Throughout the year, I am always very proud to hear feedback from my students in the form of their topic test grades. I have had multiple students see quite significant improvements in their grades through the year, which is important to me as it signifies the build up of discipline and practice which are crucial for exam success at the end of the year. Additionally, I'm happy to have contributed to 3 students at a Sixth Form I tutored at successfully entering medical school including Russell Group Universities such as UCL. This derived from both Chemistry tuition as well as interview practice.