What is Educational Therapy?

“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

Parents ask what makes educational therapy different from tutoring and other programs available to families with students who struggle to learn.  The primary distinction at the very heart of educational therapy is the continuous use of interactive language between therapist and student.  Research tells us that interactive language “directs and develops thinking skills.”  (Hopkins, 2016).  True learning does not occur simply by mastering content but occurs when there is cognitive change.  In traditional tutoring, learning is demonstrated in the product; whereas, in educational therapy, the process of learning through the use of interactive language between therapist and student is what creates change.   In traditional classrooms, teachers drive instruction, but the power of instruction is multiplied when there is a two-way dialogue between teacher and student or cooperatively between peers.  Interactive language is at the center of every technique used in educational therapy to foster growth and encourage independent thinking. 

Another distinction of educational therapy is the program is highly individualized, explicit, and intentional.  A majority of students with AND without learning challenges do not learn innately.  Rather, most students require explicit instruction. My teaching is systematic and intentional, directed to a student’s particular areas of strengths and weaknesses.  Educational therapy is not preprogrammed as a one-size-fits-all model. Instead, it focuses on the individual needs of each student as identified through formal and informal testing.  The trained therapist designs a program to stimulate the areas of deficit.

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.  Through Socratic questioning and interactive language, students are led to answer questions for themselves, to see relationships, to connect their thinking, to discover for themselves rather than to be told.   Through mediation, educational therapists promote higher-level thinking with prompts such as: how did you come to that answer, what do you notice, tell me more, help me understand your thinking, what strategy did you use, what is another way to solve.    Focusing on higher-order questioning teaches our students how to learn rather than what to learn, which is transferable to any new learning situation.   Generating good questions for our students can be used for both information seeking and information processing, the latter promoting cognitive change. 

Educational therapy is unique in that interactive language is woven into all we do with our students.  “Our most powerful and least easily replicated distinctive is the knowledge that interactive language directs and develops thinking skills.”  (Hopkins, 2016).  Our role as educational therapists is to guide our students through the use of questioning and dialogue, to draw out the inner dialogue to external and accurate oral language, to create structure and organization to their processing, to crystalize their thinking, and to stimulate cognitive change.