What Is Educational Therapy?
Educational Therapy offers children and adults with learning disabilities and other learning challenges a wide range of intensive, individualized interventions designed to remediate learning challenges.
Working with an educational therapist may not seem like a clear course of action in the beginning, and why would it. If your student goes to school, should they not be teaching these academic strategies to begin with? The simple answer is instruction in a school setting may not be enough for your student, and utilizing an additional outside source might be the better option in the long run.
While a traditional tutor can offer learning strategies, they may not fully understand the student’s unique underline learning challenges. Professionals like a doctor or psychologist are not trained to meet specific academic needs. An educational therapist is the best of both combined, but still remains flexible to meet a student’s specific challenges head on.
Educational therapy demystifies learning difficulties and stimulates clients’ awareness of their strengths so they can use those strengths to their best advantage to overcome or compensate for areas of weakness.
How is an educational therapist different than a tutor?
While a tutor generally focuses on teaching specific subject matter, an educational therapist’s focus is broader. Educational therapists work as a team with parents, teachers, and other professionals concerned with the student’s learning, and focus on remediation by building underlying learning skills.
An educational therapist will look beyond what a student might be initially struggling with. For example a student has math anxiety, a tutor might look at this challenge and force repetition of math problems over and over again to learn. It may work at the time, but an educational therapist may see this particular challenge as something deeper, like a problem with number sense. They might teach your student how to recognize number facts, or even teach them skills of how to cope with anxiety.