Andrew

Award-winning class teacher at the London School of Economics (LSE), Graduate A-Level examiner & Co-Founder of Up Learn. I recently received the LSE Class Teacher Award for "excellent teaching" and "outstanding student feedback", and was listed in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for my work in education.

After dropping out of school at 16, I achieved 4 A*s in my self-studied A Levels and won the Harvard Prize for scoring 98% at AS Level. I graduated from LSE with the highest mark out of 1400+ students in my 2nd year, winning the Economics Examiner Prize and the Rishi Madlani Award for Macroeconomics.

Over the last 7 years, I have taught 200+ students privately, 3000+ students through my online courses, and accrued ~10,000 hours of teaching experience.

I really love learning and I’ve had some incredible success in academia... but actually a very difficult time in education.

I hated school: I hated sitting bored in a classroom, not understanding what was going on, wanting to ask questions but being too afraid of looking “stupid”, and forgetting 95% of what was taught by exam time!

So, at sixteen, I dropped out of school and started tutoring part-time to support myself.

Suddenly, I was on my own, responsible for my own learning and my students`. I had to learn how to learn, and learn how to teach!

The 5 years that followed led to a powerful discovery: everything we “know” about learning is remarkably wrong.

Research from cognitive science shows that rereading notes is the least effective way to revise, and drawing is 9.5x more effective than rewriting for retention. The list of these counter-intuitive insights goes on, but our schools plod on as if science doesn’t exist.

I want to empower all of my students with the techniques needed to learn most effectively. I want to inspire inside them with a veritable passion for their subject. And, most importantly, I want them to achieve excellence.

Availability: Over the last 7 years, I have taught 200+ students privately, 3000+ students through my online courses, and accrued ~10,000 hours of teaching experience.

At LSE, I teach 2nd year Microeconomic Principles and have received outstanding feedback in my student evaluations, praised as “LSE’s best class teacher” and winning the LSE Class Teacher Award.

As a Graduate Examiner for Edexcel, I’ve developed a deep insight into how A Levels are really marked and I leverage this understanding to increase my students’ grades. Indeed, several of my A Level students have now achieved 100% in their exams (feel free to check out my reviews below) and my courses on Up Learn have maintained an impressive 97% A*-A rate (out of students who’ve completed the course).

Willing to travel: 50 miles

Experience: My approach to tutoring is results-driven and grounded in the cognitive science behind how students really learn.

Lessons are structured as a series of Socratic questions. Students’ answers to these questions will take them to the next stage of the explanation, and eventually we reach its conclusion - which is always a wonderful “aha” moment for students.

Because I’m asking my students questions (rather than lecturing them!) I’m able to pinpoint any misconceptions in their understanding immediately, which we can dispel and move forward.

The questioning approach makes use of the “testing effect”: students who are tested (or test themselves) on what they’ve learnt invariably outperform students who don’t - sometimes by as much as 50% (the equivalent of going from a C grade to an A*). It also takes advantage of “generation”: students asked to generate their own answers to questions before being shown the correct answer, remember the correct solution more robustly than students who are just given the solutions.

After each lesson, I ask my students to create memorable flashcards, using a technique known as “visceralisation”. I teach my students how to organise their flashcards systematically so they can review them over spaced intervals - this takes advantage of “spaced repetition”, which has been shown to double retention.

I monitor my students’ progress meticulously, and adapt our lesson progression according to their learning needs. I focus on “mastery learning”, which means we devote as much time to a topic as is required for mastery - mastery is how students achieve 100% at A Level (not just A*s). Of course, if time is short, I make sure we’re prioritising the most relevant topics for examination and carefully plan out the most productive use of our lesson time.