South Burlington ELL Placement 9/30/16

On Monday this past week, I began my first day of tutoring with my first ELL student. For the sake of protecting the student's identity, I will refer to her as T. T asked for help with math homework, and for the entirety of our time together, we worked to gain an understanding of the concepts she was working on in class, which we were successful in doing. Going into the tutoring session, I was unsure of what level of math T was engaged in. I found that I didn't recall how to do the problems myself, so we ended up discussing what we though the solutions would be, bouncing ideas between us until finally we discovered how they should be completed the right way. Then after some practice, T felt very confident in her ability to complete the problems. By conversing and working the problem out, T was able to find out on her own how to solve the problems, even with my initial inability to lead her directly to an answer, and become comfortable with her work. This trouble ended up showing me another way to help students reach their own conclusions and to teach through what could have become an awkward encounter of simply not knowing how to help.