Online Biology Tutor Philip

New to Spires with eight years secondary education experience both in the UK and internationally. Biology BSc (Bath university), PGCE Secondary science and Master's of education (University of Cambridge).

3 years experience as an English language teacher/tutor working with students of all ages and levels in Portugal, China, Belgium and the UK.

8 years post PGCE experience teaching/tutoring the three sciences at GCSE and A-level Biology in addition to AS Physics. My teaching experience includes two years at Queen Ethelburga's college, UK, three years as lead science teacher at AGS Muscat international school, Oman and most recently two years as head of the science department at Bromsgrove international school, Bangkok, Thailand.

Throughout this period I have tutored students towards their GCSEs and A-levels both in-person and more recently, online.

A level Biology

AS level Physics

GCSE Science (Biology, Chemistry and Physics)

English as a foreign language

Latin

Any good teacher knows there's no such thing as 'one size fits all' method of teaching, while teachers will have their personal preferences, a good lesson should be tailored to the content and student(s) being taught and as such the way one approaches a GCSE Physics topic such as kinetic energy will be very different to how one approaches A-level enzyme kinematics.

My teaching does however stick to a few key principles:

- Lessons must have a question as an objective: without an objective a lesson may drift off-course, it quickly becomes impossible to measure the success of a lesson when it has not had a clear focus, both teacher and student need to know at the beginning of the lesson what is the key question they are trying to answer in order to understand whether the lesson has been successful!

- Lessons must review and build upon what came before: It's much easier to remember and understand new ideas when you approach them as a story. Stories have a beginning, middle and end, and so does your understanding of a concept; however it becomes impossible to understand a whole story if you've forgotten or misunderstood the previous page. As teachers we must constantly review what came before in order to build deeper understanding and to ultimately have access to this knowledge through long-term memory when exam time comes.

- Lessons must be a continual dialogue: Thorough understanding is built actively not passively and tuition allows far greater scope for active dialogue with the teacher than any secondary school classroom. My lessons progress though dialogue with the student and will alter course when it is clear a topic needs further explanation. Where students may become lost in a school setting as a teacher follows a fixed plan from beginning to conclusion, tuition provides the flexibility to allow the tutor to know the student's live understanding through continual dialogue and to alter the plan accordingly.

I take the time to discuss and to get to know how best my new students learn in order to develop schemes of work and lessons to help them reach their goals, I pace the lessons accordingly and avoid the lazy 'death by powerpoint' approach which is all too prevalent in today's higher education settings. In order to truly achieve all the above the teacher must of course have a detailed understanding of the content being taught, only a thorough understanding will allow the teacher to approach the topics from multiple perspectives as is required by different students, I believe the academic qualifications of the teacher are key to ascertaining their foundational knowledge.