A Cognitive Literacy Approach

 
 

A Cognitive 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 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 rather than treat the symptoms as tutoring, accommodations or modifications do.

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 designed expressly for remediating 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 NON-TUTORIAL. The goal is not to fill a bucket with knowledge in order to pass a test or complete an assignment. Rather, educational therapy strengthens core academic skills while focusing on higher-order processing.

  “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)

Search & Teach ©

Identification and Intervention for 5 and 6-year-old Students with Learning Difficulties Before Academic Failure and Emotional Consequences Occur

SEARCH & TEACH© was developed by child psychiatrist Archie Silver, M.D. (1917-2010) and psychologist Rosa A. Hagin, Ph.D., and the staff of the Learning Disorders Unit at the New York University School of Medicine. It is based on extensive interdisciplinary research on the diagnosis and treatment of learning disorders. SEARCH & TEACH© is an early intervention program that ascertains the needs of young learners before they experience academic failure and its associated emotional consequences.

SEARCH & TEACH© was unanimously approved by the Joint Dissemination and Review Panel of the U.S. Office of Education and has been implemented throughout the U.S. in various schools and clinical settings.

Since 1980, SEARCH & TEACH© has been cited in the U.S. Office of Education publication Education Programs That Work.

SEARCH©

Search© is a 20-minute individual assessment designed to:

  1. IDENTIFY 5 and 6-year-old children vulnerable to learning difficulties

  2. Create a CLEAR PICTURE of a child’s learning strengths and weaknesses in neuropsychological skills basic to reading and language arts

  3. Provide a FRAMEWORK FOR INTERVENTION before academic failure has occurred or is evident

TEACH©

TEACH© is a series of instructional methods and fifty-five task cards that builds a child’s pre-academic skills specific to reading and the language arts. TEACH© provides the rationale, with techniques and materials that are necessary for intervention with children who are found to be vulnerable to academic failure as determined by SEARCH©.

The TEACH© program is organized to facilitate learning according to YOUR INDIVIDUAL CHILD’S SEARCH© profile. As such, the Educational Therapist considers your child’s cognitive and academic strengths and weaknesses and prescribes appropriate instructional tasks basic to reading and the language arts.

The TEACH© program prioritizes pre-reading tasks from simple to complex and organizes them into a practical plan of five cognitive clusters as derived by the results of the SEARCH© test. These clusters include:

  1. Visual

  2. Visual-Motor

  3. Auditory

  4. Body Image (Students’ awareness of their body relative to their orientation to objects, ex. directionality/laterality)

  5. Intermodal Skills