Educational Therapy

What is Educational Therapy?

Educational therapy provides vital support for students with learning differences, helping bridge the gap between their current learning experiences and their potential. Educational therapists (ETs) design personalized sessions to tackle academic challenges and promote a holistic growth journey, transforming students into confident, skilled learners. These sessions focus on building efficient learning habits, fostering a growth mindset, and enhancing social-emotional learning.

 

How Can Educational Therapy Support Students?

Students entering educational therapy often carry an "invisible suitcase" of partially learned and unlearned skills that can overshadow their talents and abilities. Educational therapists employ structured skill-building exercises to uncover and develop these latent skills. This process helps students improve their capacity to self-advocate, self-monitor, comprehend, communicate effectively, and engage in critical mathematical reasoning.

 

Goals and Benefits

Educational therapy is not about directly teaching specific subjects like science or geometry. Instead, it focuses on empowering students to overcome the obstacles that impede their ability to learn these subjects independently. By addressing poor academics, lack of social-emotional skills, and low self-esteem—which often hide weak basic skills and fragile cognitive functions—ET sessions aim to activate and reinforce successful learning strategies. This approach helps students build a strong lifelong learning and personal growth foundation.

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Resource: 

The Clinical Practice of Educational Therapy: Learning and Functioning with Diversity, Maxine Ficksman and Jane Utley Adelizzi (Editors), 2018