The teaching style section is optional. It asks four questions about how you run a session, and you choose whether your answers show on your profile.
The four questions
Answer each one for your usual practice, not a one-off. The wording parents then read is fixed, and it is the sentence under each question below.
How do you approach session planning?
Sets a plan in advance and works through it in order.
Adapts each session to that week’s work.
How do you choose materials for a student?
Uses materials tailored for each learner.
Uses resources the student may already be familiar with.
When a student is stuck, do you tend to guide them step by step, or give them space to work it out?
Gives step-by-step guidance and worked examples.
Gives prompts and space to work things out independently.
Unless a student or family asks otherwise, where does the work happen?
Keeps work inside the session.
Sets work between sessions.
None of the four has a better answer. The section exists to make the difference between tutors visible, not to rank it.
Once all four are answered you can switch the section on, and it appears on your profile as four rows. It tells parents it is a rough guide to how you usually teach, not a hard rule for every lesson, and it appears there only, not on search result cards.
What happens when parents review you
Parents are asked the same four questions in the past tense when they review you, and can skip them. Your own answer is never overwritten by theirs: once enough parents have answered one question, we show what they described alongside your answer, and yours stays as you set it. It is not a score and not a badge. You see each parent's answers on your reviews page, and your profile only ever shows the pooled result. How we rank sets out the threshold and how the two are combined.
Two answers never count against you. A parent who picks "I haven't seen enough to say" is left out of that question entirely. And on the homework question, a parent who was never offered work between sessions picks "Work between sessions was not requested", so you are not marked down for work nobody wanted.
Where you appear in search
Parents can answer the same four questions on their results page in Find a tutor, and results are then ordered by how closely each tutor matches. Answering is not itself an advantage: a tutor who has not answered sits in the middle rather than at the bottom, so a matching answer moves you up and a non-matching one moves you down by the same amount. How we rank has the detail.
Which answer to give
The accurate one. Most tutors do some of both, so answer for what a parent would see in most weeks with a typical student, rather than for the one student who is the exception. If you genuinely do both in equal measure, pick the answer you lean towards and say more in your bio.
The accurate answer is also the one that holds up. An answer picked because it sounds appealing is the one most likely to end up showing that parents described something else, which is more visible on your profile than the accurate answer would have been.
Changing your answer
You can change any of the four at any time in the profile editor, or clear them, and the change goes live when you publish. A publish with only these changed does not go into review, because the answers are fixed options rather than free text.
If your profile shows that parents described something different, changing your answer is the fix. What we show is worked out against whatever your answer currently says, so it follows the change.
Why we ask it this way
We ask about four things a parent can observe rather than qualities like patience or encouragement. A parent can tell you whether sessions followed a plan and whether work was set between them. They cannot reliably report how patient you were from outside the lesson.