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Set up sessions

It's important find a comfortable meeting place for your student.

When meeting potential students, discuss potential locations and lesson durations. Consider your student's age and goals when deciding up the length and frequency of tutoring sessions.

Then decide where you'll meet. You can meet your student in your own home, your student's home, or the library. It depends on where both of you are comfortable. Yeah—the Library!

Libraries are great meeting places.

Make sure that your tutoring (especially music studies) won't bother those around you.

And make sure the distractions to your session will be minimal. Close

Before you decide on what you'll charge your students, ask around and see what others are charging. A good starting range is between $5 and $10 for half an hour.

Determine your rate by examining your own abilities, and how much work you personally put into a lesson. Figure in the cost of transportation.

Find a reasonable rate that you feel happy and comfortable charging.

Trial session

Once everything is set up, it is very important to do a trial lesson—not all students and tutors will be a good match. That's OK.  Trial Sessions

If you want a comfortable relationship that encourages success, schedule a trial session. Close

During the trial session, first get to know your student. Listen to his or her goals and past experiences to get a picture of who your student is and what he or she needs from you.

Learn to recognize personality types and behaviors that clash with yours. It will help you identify the challenges your relationship might face and prepare you to help each student be successful.

Identify Challenges

Do you like to get down to business right away, or do you like to chat first? Does loud gum chewing drive you crazy? Are you a gum-chewer yourself?

Learn to make adjustments or avoid students with conflicting habits. Or, you might decide to accept exposure to differences and unique personalities as a perk of tutoring.

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Time to learn!

Before my first music lesson with a new student, I ask her to prepare a piece for me. After hearing the piece, I can evaluate my student's starting level and determine some of her strong and weak areas.

I then fix some of the problems I've noted, and give an assignment for the next week that incorporates the ideas we talked about in the lesson.

This can be adapted to any other subject.

If all goes well...