I encourage you to personally tour the school and meet the educators and students, form your own opinion and leave a comment here.
Best of luck with your search for the perfect school!
Dr Timothy Tan is the founder of Square Academy located in Hawthorn, Melbourne. Square Academy claims to offer a kind of tuition that “equips your child for success in life, not just their exams”.
Tim has made some bold statements about the current state of education and the importance of teaching creativity and critical thinking rather than the traditional facts and figures. His educational philosophy is to reignite childhood curiosity and creativity by encouraging critical thinking in his classes.
I had the opportunity to learn more about Tim and his unique style of teaching.
Table of Contents
- Transitioning from Marine Biologist and Academic to Starting a Tuition Business
- Why Square Academy Prioritizes Authentic Teaching Over Just Marks
- The Importance of Critical Thinking – Why It Matters and How It’s Developed at Square Academy
- Building Resilience in Students
- Interdisciplinary Learning Why Connecting Concepts Across Subjects Prepares Students for the Future
- Addressing Pitfalls in Traditional Tutoring
- Giving Back Through Free Study Guides
- Balancing Academic Success with Personal Growth
Q1. Can you tell us about your journey, from being a marine biologist and teaching at university to founding Square Academy? What inspired you to start this tutoring business?
After graduating with an Honours degree from The University of Melbourne, I worked as a marine biologist for a year before starting my PhD back at the university. I started teaching into various Biology and Medicine-related subjects and my passion for teaching grew over the years. Soon I was teaching over 20 hours a week, giving lectures and leading workshops and practical classes with over 100 students while still completing my PhD. I found a real sense of purpose and satisfaction helping students enjoy what they were learning and wanting to join my tutorial classes so much that they would willingly sit on the floor when there weren’t enough chairs. Their appreciation made me want to be a better teacher, and this created a positive feedback loop.
After I obtained my PhD, I joined the university as a Teaching Specialist. During this time, I spearheaded several initiatives in teaching innovation, from connecting students with mentors via coffee and chat sessions to promoting student collaboration by encouraging them to create test questions for each other using a peer testing platform. In one of my projects, students would conduct little science experiments with pre-schoolers at the university’s childcare centre.
I left the university several years after and became an English tutor, teaching Grade 3-12 students. I eventually took on the role of Head of Curriculum and VCE at my organisation. While there were aspects I enjoyed at each of my former careers, there were many issues ingrained within the education system that I felt restricted my ability to innovate. Therefore, I made the exciting (and daunting) decision to teach on my own so I could challenge parents and students to look at education and tutoring differently.
Q2. Many tuition businesses focus purely on exam results. Square Academy seems to focus on other things, why is that?
I started Square Academy so that I could focus on authentic teaching. This does not mean that I ignore assessments or marks entirely; the reality is that it is very difficult for many to imagine an education system that is so different from what they have been exposed to their whole lives.
However, I make it clear to all prospective students and parents that my primary commitment is to education, and I sincerely believe that seeing their children grow in confidence, critical thinking, creativity, and the love for learning are far more reliable and tangible measures of success than their school assessments.
Teachers exist to inspire and mentor the next generation by imparting wisdom, not knowledge. Yet exams focus almost entirely on assessing knowledge, not wisdom. Exams that are poorly designed (or even compromised in the case of many VCE exams) will also drastically reduce the value of exams as an indicator of ‘success’.
Time and again, I’ve seen how students light up when they are taught something they find genuinely useful, and very rarely did these moments come as part of the prescribed curriculum.
Q3. Why do you think it is important to build critical thinking skills, and how do you build it?
Critical thinking is closely associated with cultivating creativity and a joy of learning. When students question something, they are demonstrating initiative and taking ownership of their education. Yet, conventional education often discourages such behaviour; students who do so are often labelled ‘difficult’, ‘disruptive’, or ‘troublemakers’. Such an education system cultivates meek, docile students akin to machines but without the computing ability to rival actual computers.
As a simple example, try asking a student why they study [insert subject] in school. Would you find their answer inspiring or even satisfying?
I always make it a point to ask new students questions like this, and most of the time, students will reply with “I don’t know”, “because I have to”, or “so that I can do [a certain course] in university”. Once in a while, students will attempt to give an answer that is somewhat politically correct, such as “because it will help me [with something] when I grow up”, but very rarely will a student give me an inspiring reply such as “because science has the potential to change the world” or “because language is our primary means of communicating ideas” or “because the patterns found in maths are also everywhere around us”.
Isn’t it a problem that most students find school uninspiring and lacking purpose, yet continue to go through the routine without questioning it? I suspect many teachers are either unwilling or unable to engage students in such a discussion as well, and many of those who do struggle to emulate such a passion in their classroom.
I build critical thinking in my classroom by letting my students know that they can ask any question they want. This creates an atmosphere of openness where no subject is considered taboo. I am not afraid to explore a difficult question with my students and go down a rabbit hole with them. This also ties into my passion for interdisciplinary learning because insightful discussions often must be allowed to cross boundaries. In exchange, I often ask ‘why’ and challenge my students on their presuppositions as well.
Q4. Academic challenges can be overwhelming for students. How do you help them build resilience and learn to overcome setbacks?
Last year, after a lesson with one of my Y12 students, I noticed she was looking a little off during the class. It turns out she was feeling overwhelmed by school and the pressure to do well because she was surrounded by high achievers (she goes to a prestigious private school).
It was then that I told her something I tell all my students — so what if you don’t do well? So what if, in the worst case scenario, you completely fail and have to repeat VCE? How do you know it would not lead to something even better than what you hoped for? Some of the world’s most influential people were high-school or college dropouts.
She was a little taken aback, but seemed to cheer up after the chat, and the subject never really came up again.
That was until we spoke again a few months ago, and she told me a part of that story that she didn’t tell me that day. Earlier that day before our lesson, her teacher reminded the class that they had a big assignment due very soon that she completely forgot about. And as she looked around the class, it seemed like everyone else knew about the deadline except her, which got her extremely stressed. She tried telling herself it would be ok, but she couldn’t get herself out of that mental rut. She said she “really needed someone as academically accomplished as me to tell her that it was ok, it doesn’t matter.”
After that conversation, she said she was able to relax, pull herself together, and just try to complete the assignment without stressing over how good it was going to be.
And believe it or not, she scored the top in her class for that assignment, despite not trying, and starting so late.
I didn’t help her with that assignment (it was not a subject I taught). She did it entirely on her own because she just did what she could without worrying about the outcome.
So my answer to that question is: I build academic resilience, ironically, by showing them that academics aren’t important.
When students realise that ‘it’s not that big a deal’, it frees them to step outside their comfort zone, take risks and be creative. They are less likely to be ashamed if they don’t do well, and are able to pick themselves back up to try again. Telling students that ‘their life is over if they fail’ is absolutely not the way to build resilience, and is also patently false.
Q5. Why do you believe it’s important for students to connect concepts across different subjects? How does this prepare them for the future?
The greatest advancements in the world have always been inspired by those who could see the connections between different fields of study. Consider polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci, who was a master of art, engineering, science, and literature, and consequently came up with inventions centuries before his time.
If the goal of education is to understand the world, then it makes little sense to do so in isolation. By helping students make connections between disciplines, it makes what they are learning more relevant and accessible to them, which is how learning becomes enjoyable. On a more practical note, it also means that what they learn will more likely be useful to them regardless of their future career, because what they learned transcends discrete subjects.
Q6. What do you believe are the most common pitfalls in traditional tutoring, and how does Square Academy address them?
Perhaps one of the most common pitfalls is the overemphasis of marks in education. Often times, the assessment becomes the sole reason why anything is taught in class. As one teacher who explained why they are leaving the education system after 25 years put it:
We don’t read or discuss poetry for pleasure or so we can make a lovely poem for a family member; we do this briefly and then focus on teaching students the criteria of the rubric for the poetry assessment, so we can grade them on their final poem/s.
I believe that EVERY activity we do in school MUST have intrinsic value, not simply because ‘it’s going to be on the exam’.
One way I avoid this pitfall is by expecting all my students to articulate what they have learned after each lesson, and I make it clear that ‘what they learned’ is not the same as ‘what we did’. ‘What they did’ might be something like:
“We covered the immune system of humans”.
‘What we learned’, on the other hand, sounds more like:
“I learned that the immune system functions much like the layers of defence used in war. I also learned that the different branches of the immune system have advantages and disadvantages; while the adaptive immune response is more specific and potent, it takes time to build up and requires the fast-acting innate immune response to cover for it in the meantime. This is a good example of how a team functions best when people with different skillsets know how to collaborate well together.”
I do this as a way of holding both myself and students accountable; I want to ensure that they get value out of each session and address any issues as soon as possible.
Q7. Square Academy produces free study guides for students in need. Why was it important to you to include this as part of your work?
In my years of teaching, I had come to appreciate just how many students were out there in all sorts of life situations — students who were struggling in school but for whom tutoring was completely out of reach. I also witnessed just how much students loathed the English texts they were studying — by the time the exam was over, social media posts of students burning or tearing their books up would pop up everywhere!
Therefore, I had an idea to create a type of study guide that would resemble Wikipedia, incorporating analyses of relevant quotes within the text, while allowing people to search and even contribute to analysis. I felt that such a guide would be far superior and more efficient than annotating on a physical book or PDF that most schools still regularly encourage students to do, and I wanted to help students and teachers get past the ‘annotation’ phase that takes up so much class time and move on to the ‘learning how to communicate ideas’ phase of English classes.
As a teacher whose goal is to impart wisdom to others, the thought of ‘withholding information’ for no reason other than monetary gain was something that I could not reconcile with. I also genuinely believed that my value as a teacher came from my interactions with students, not the study guides I produced, and I wanted to conduct my business true to that belief, which was why I decided to make the study guides public.
I’m glad to say that thousands of students from over 100 schools have used them so far! My hope is that this will encourage both students and teachers to adopt a more collaborative mindset to education, and know that it is possible to give back to the community while running a sustainable business.
Q8. What would you say to parents who are looking for purely academic results from a tutor?
I completely empathise with that. For many students, Year 12 exams significantly influence their trajectory in life and I ensure my students are fully prepared for them.
But reflecting on 2024 alone, I’ve had the privilege of teaching world-class ballet dancers, skiing champions, soccer sensations and basketball captains. I’ve taught true crime aficionados, avid scuba divers, cosplay artists and upcoming authors. I’ve taught students struggling with depression and ADHD who still get out of bed each day and do the best they can. I’ve taught former refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria who are trying to make the most of their new lives. I’ve taught brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, who work hard at their part time jobs on top of studying to take care of their siblings and parents.
And as I remember this, I’m reminded that grades are such a tiny reflection of a person’s life. I’ve seen many academically talented students struggle at university. They struggle to manage an average study load, break down in class, feel completely isolated, lack any sense of purpose or passion in life, or escape into fantasy worlds to cope with everything.
Many students don’t need a tutor or a teacher; they need a mentor. Someone who has the wisdom and experience to guide them through their studies and life. It is my job to fill those gaps in your children’s lives so they can achieve their full potential.
If you’d like to learn more about Square Academy visit the website www.square-academy.com
* Square Academy is a sponsor of Melbourne Schools. Learn more about them here.
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