A Cognitive Structured Literacy Approach

 
 

A Cognitive Structured Literacy Approach

A cognitive literacy approach partners neuroscience with educational practice. Strong readers need more than the five essential components of reading - phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension. Strong readers need the foundational cognitive skills of attention, visual and auditory processing and memory. The most effective literacy approach combines cognition and the essential components of reading. Through systematic instruction, using an Orton-Gillingham method, students not only develop their reading skills, but also rewire their brains.

 


Educational Therapy

Rooted in the cognitive structured literacy approach, educational therapy is a program designed to help students with learning difficulties including dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, executive functioning, processing, and memory deficits. The focus of educational therapy is to address the underlying causes of learning difficulties while simultaneously building the areas of academic concern.

Therapy involves intense, individualized sessions rooted in the Orton-Gillingham method with additional techniques that continually stimulate and develop areas of perception, cognition, language, and thinking skills.

Over the last half-century, the Orton-Gillingham approach has been the most influential intervention specifically designed to remediate the language processing problems of children and adults with dyslexia. The Orton-Gillingham approach is language-based, multisensory, structured, sequential, cumulative, cognitive, and flexible. 

Educational therapy is tutoring on steroids! The goal is not just to fill a bucket with knowledge in order to pass a test or complete an assignment. Rather, educational therapy strengthens core academic skills while boosting the underlying cognitive skills necessary for learning.

  “We use our understanding of the skills involved with learning and data-driven explicit intentional interventions to train our students HOW to learn, not WHAT to learn.”

— Jane Stout

How does Educational Therapy differ from Tutoring?

 Educational Therapy focuses on:

  • building the learning processes

  • the individual deficit areas

  • teaching how to learn

  • developing language and thinking through effective questioning

  • remediating the underlying skills essential for learning, such as:

    • visual processing, figure-ground, attention, sequencing, tracking, and memory

    • auditory processing, figure-ground, attention, sequencing, and memory

    • inter-modal perception (the coordination or integration of information from two or more senses, such as touch and vision)

    • self-regulation and executive functioning

    • language comprehension

Tutoring focuses on:

  • treating the symptoms

  • academic content

  • teaching what to think

  • the product (i.e. passing a test)