Tomos

Qualified Teacher, former Head of Physics at top performing school.

Monday-Friday evenings, and Mon-Fri day currently available

--GCSE Physics, GCSE Maths, A level Physics, A level Maths, A level Further Maths, ENGAA/PAT/NSAA-

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Hello all, my name is Tomos.

After studying an integrated Masters in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Bath, I joined one of the highest performing non-selective schools in the country, gaining my teaching qualification, and going on to becoming the school’s Head of Physics.

I’m now perusing a Masters in Artificial Intelligence and am making use of my expertise gained during my teaching career to tutor.
The best part of teaching has always been sitting with a student, fostering their enthusiasm for the subject through building their confidence, and it’s wonderful to continue to do this through tutoring.

I’m committed to evidenced based practice in education. With the best of intentions, students (and indeed teachers) often gravitate towards ‘study’ activities which feel like study, but produce only a very small amount of learning at best (e.g. re-reading, highlighting). This is often very disheartening- nothing seems to stick, studying more doesn’t make things any better, and a student can feel that they just don’t get it.

Luckily there are a number of effective learning strategies which, although feel difficult, produce durable learning (retrieval practise being the most important). These are at the heart of my tutoring sessions- I educate students on these strategies as we use them so students can integrate them into their own study. So students receive not only the benefit of the tutoring session itself, but also of improved independent study.

Tutoring Experience

I have over seven years’ experience teaching A-level physics, maths, and further maths, and have a strong track record of helping my students achieve excellent grades in their exams.
I have pushed students on Ds to strong Bs, and students scraping As to achieving comfortable A*s.

As well as classroom teaching I have also delivered many 1-to-1 sessions with students who need additional help. Through marking and delivering feedback on countless mock exams I have a well-developed ability to quickly spot errors and understand the likely misconceptions that have led to them.

Tutoring Approach

When tutoring any student, I have two primary aims-

1. The student is engaged, feels enthusiasm for the subject, and feels positive about their ability to learn.
2. That my teaching methods lead to as much meaningful learning in the time available as possible.

For aim 2, I use the available research in the science of learning to make sure my teaching methods are well supported by evidence. This leads to lots of progress being made in sessions, which then leads to students feeling engaged and happy in their learning.

-------Cognitive Load- -------
I aim to keep students at just the right level of cognitive load (mental effort) to support the most learning.

I base the bulk of my sessions on exam questions which are a brilliant resource for developing understanding of physics and maths, as well as for improving ‘exam technique’. With maintaining the correct cognitive load in mind I’m very deliberate in the exam questions I pick for students to attempt.

For a student who’s struggling, I keep each exam question similar to the previous to helps them get to grips with the fundamentals of the topic.
As their confidence improve I order exam questions on the basis of ‘minimally separable concepts’- a mixture of question which look the same but require very different approaches. Students can’t simply rely on reproducing a learned method here and so develop a deeper understanding of the maths/physics involved. As a result, students are better able to spot what a question is asking them to do when they sit their exams.

------------------------------Durable Learning- ‘But I knew it in class!?’--------------------------------- --
With a bit of teaching experience, it’s reasonably straight forward to help a student, who is initially lacking confidence, to reach the point in a session where they are correctly answering questions. Yet the frustrating experience of so many students is that when they attempt the same type of questions later on, it’s as if they learned nothing! Of course, students find this enormously disheartening and demotivating.

Thankfully, this can be remedied through implementing the finding from cognitive psychology into durable learning. I therefore always weave the topics of previous sessions into future ones, carefully considering the length of time between reviews for the most benefit.

--------------------------------University Applications-------------------------------------------
I have helped many students with their university entrance exams- the Cambridge ENGAA, Oxford PAT, and the maths and physics sections of the Cambridge NSAA. I’ve created a programme of study to help tackle the key topics which typically come up in these papers, as well as the function sketching skills often tested during interviews.

I also help students prepare for their university admission interviews- this involves two parts.
1. Personal Statement-Testing their knowledge of the technical aspects of their personal statements and then extending their understanding of these topics to an undergraduate level.
2. Technical Question- Setting a difficult technical question and guiding a student to improve their approach to the problem and ability to verbalise their thought process.

Put together I’ve significantly improved students’ interview performance in only a few sessions.