Our mission is to make real English education accessible to all.
Part of that is through tutoring (we have to keep the lights on).
Part of that is through outreach.
More Than Tutoring
We believe great English teaching shouldn't only be available to students who can afford one-on-one tutoring. That's why we put a huge amount of what we know out into the world for free - through our YouTube channel, our blog, and The Commonplace Prize, a writing competition open to any VCE student. If you never work with us directly, we still want you to walk away a better writer.
More details here
About Our Classes
English is often not taught in an easy way. Most students who come to Hello Smart don't know more about essays than 'TEEL structure'. Most have no idea how to study for English beyond 'making a quote bank'. And, worst of all, most have no idea what a good essay looks like.
Over five years of experience and development have gone into our intensive curriculum. Rather than use traditional tutoring or classroom teaching techniques, we get our students writing from day one. Our program teaches English with a structure that anyone can follow.
How do you teach essay writing (text response or argument analysis)?
For every essay you might be asked to write at school, we have formulae which break what you have to do down to the level of paragraphs, and even sentences. We create simple blocks you can put together to ensure you are hitting all the criteria you will be marked on.
How do you teach particular books?
We follow an intensely focused curriculum which directs you on how to write essays from day one. We ensure our students know the plot of their texts so they can't be faulted on factual accuracy. We then break down every text's themes from multiple different angles, and provide more than enough evidence and analysis for each, so that students need look no further to create high-scoring responses. This ensures students have ideas ready to go, no matter what prompt they are given in timed conditions.
How do you improve writing ability?
We realise that the best way to learn greatness is to imitate it. We give our students a bank of example essays they can use to understand different ways to express ideas. We also provide sentence starters and vocabulary banks so students can master new styles of writing.
How do you help students write to time?
We teach and reinforce comprehensive planning methods and ways of thinking about prompts to ensure that students will always be able to come up with three viable and interesting body paragraphs.
It's really so structured that anyone can do it!