Tutor profile - Joel

Joel is a passionate educator and humanities specialist with a love of learning and a track record of helping young people to achieve and exceed their academic potential. He has six years’ experience of teaching history and religious studies, and a further three years working exclusively with SEN students as a teaching assistant and mentor. He has taught history at all key stages, including GCSE and A level, and religious studies at Key Stage 3. Academically, his background is in history, philosophy and politics. He has two masters-level qualifications in philosophy (from Warwick, and Kingston University’s Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy) and is currently working part-time towards a PhD in the politics and religion of renaissance England, at UCL.

As a former secondary school teacher, Joel is confident, resourceful and has a wealth of strategies and tools to draw on in tailoring his tuition to the unique needs, learning style and level of his students. He has years of experience helping students to prepare for specific exams across the humanities and social sciences, especially GCSE and A levels, and is up to date with mark schemes and assessment criteria across a range of subjects, qualifications and exam boards, including common entrance exams.

Joel’s approach to tutoring is guided by a commitment to making a positive, consistent and long-term impact on the academic progress of his students, from the outset of his tuition. His experience enables him to quickly assess the level students are working at before working with students, families and teachers to quickly put in place a learning plan with concrete and achievable objectives. This might entail: building consistency and familiarity in responding to a particular exam paper; developing subject-specific written or analytical skills; mastering knowledge and understanding of a text, topic or historical period; building confidence; developing written or verbal clarity of expression. Throughout, Joel guides his students but aims to work collaboratively, encouraging his tutees to take ownership of their learning and making sure that they understand what they are working towards, why, and how they will get there.

Joel is readily familiar with the challenges students can face in and out of the classroom and has a suite of remedies and strategies to address these, tailored to each individual. These include deconstructing exam questions, practising and drilling exam responses, using probing questions to generate discussion and develop student thinking, providing focused support with sentence construction, developing paragraph and essay-writing technique, using bespoke recap quizzes, helping tutees to build revision skills, organise time, and make sense of complex content. In doing so, Joel draws on a range of resources such as revision guides, relevant current affairs, online content, historical objects, literature, even relevant trips where appropriate.

Above all, Joel always aims to make learning enjoyable - humour, games and improvisation are essential to learning well! - he celebrates academic achievements (both large and small) and gives consistent encouragement to his students to help build motivation and foster a love of learning.