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 problems.
Educational Therapy demystifies learning problems and stimulates clients’ awareness of their strengths so they can use those strengths to overcome or strengthen their areas of weakness. A good Educational Therapist will be able to clearly explain a student's strengths or weaknesses and use that information to form a comprehensive treatment plan to help the student become a more efficient learner.
Educational Therapists create and implement individualized treatment plans that use information from a variety of sources including the client’s social, emotional, psycho-educational, and neuropsychological context.
Educational Therapy is a process that combines an understanding of how learning takes place in the brain with knowledge of specialized teaching methods. Through skilled assessment, case management, and alternative teaching methods, educational therapy empowers children and adults with learning disabilities and other learning challenges to learn and develop optimally.
I am an Educational Therapist with over 22 years of experience in:
- reading, analyzing, understanding, and explaining previous testing
- understanding my client's strengths and weaknesses
- developing individualized treatment plans
- prioritizing cognitive and academic skill training
- working with families to optimize student's thinking skills
- working with schools to help develop and implement IEPs for my clients
- training a variety of cognitive skills including attention & focus, planning & organization, executive function skills, phonemic and phonological processing, logic & reasoning, fluency skills, as well as visual & auditory processing skills.
- training a wide range of academic skills including pre-reading, reading, reading and listening comprehension, oral and written expression, spelling, a variety of math skills - through Algebra II, Social Studies, Economics, Composition, and a variety of Sciences
- training professionals for their standardized exams including Medical Boards, LSATs, police academy curriculum, and the fire fighter advancement exam as well as Food Management tests, a pilots license, and stock broker testing.
All people learn in unique ways. An experienced Educational Therapist can form an individualized learning plan for each client. The purpose of the learning plan is to clearly document and share the process that the Educational Therapist will guide the client through in order to reach their individual goals. A good, individualized learning plan should contain both long term and short term goals. The learning plan should also include the objectives that will be mastered in order to achieve the client's short term goals. As the client meets their learning objectives and goals, the learning plan should be re-written as needed. All learning objectives and goals should be clearly stated and measureable. Each learning plan should cover a reasonable amount of time - maybe 10 or 20 sessions. During that time period the client and Educational Therapist focus on achieving their specific goals and objectives.
Educational Therapy demystifies learning problems and stimulates clients’ awareness of their strengths so they can use those strengths to overcome or strengthen their areas of weakness. A good Educational Therapist will be able to clearly explain a student's strengths or weaknesses and use that information to form a comprehensive treatment plan to help the student become a more efficient learner.
Educational Therapists create and implement individualized treatment plans that use information from a variety of sources including the client’s social, emotional, psycho-educational, and neuropsychological context.
Educational Therapy is a process that combines an understanding of how learning takes place in the brain with knowledge of specialized teaching methods. Through skilled assessment, case management, and alternative teaching methods, educational therapy empowers children and adults with learning disabilities and other learning challenges to learn and develop optimally.
I am an Educational Therapist with over 22 years of experience in:
- reading, analyzing, understanding, and explaining previous testing
- understanding my client's strengths and weaknesses
- developing individualized treatment plans
- prioritizing cognitive and academic skill training
- working with families to optimize student's thinking skills
- working with schools to help develop and implement IEPs for my clients
- training a variety of cognitive skills including attention & focus, planning & organization, executive function skills, phonemic and phonological processing, logic & reasoning, fluency skills, as well as visual & auditory processing skills.
- training a wide range of academic skills including pre-reading, reading, reading and listening comprehension, oral and written expression, spelling, a variety of math skills - through Algebra II, Social Studies, Economics, Composition, and a variety of Sciences
- training professionals for their standardized exams including Medical Boards, LSATs, police academy curriculum, and the fire fighter advancement exam as well as Food Management tests, a pilots license, and stock broker testing.
All people learn in unique ways. An experienced Educational Therapist can form an individualized learning plan for each client. The purpose of the learning plan is to clearly document and share the process that the Educational Therapist will guide the client through in order to reach their individual goals. A good, individualized learning plan should contain both long term and short term goals. The learning plan should also include the objectives that will be mastered in order to achieve the client's short term goals. As the client meets their learning objectives and goals, the learning plan should be re-written as needed. All learning objectives and goals should be clearly stated and measureable. Each learning plan should cover a reasonable amount of time - maybe 10 or 20 sessions. During that time period the client and Educational Therapist focus on achieving their specific goals and objectives.
My Philosophy
Learning is...complicated. Learning is extremely complicated and made up of such difficult ideas as brain chemistry, experiences, electricity, sensory input, psychology, neurology, memories, developmental levels, and cognition...the list goes on and on. Because it is so technical and complex, I'd like to use a picture that most people are familiar with to describe learning as I see it.
Imagine a house. The house sits on a foundation that sits on the earth. The house has walls and a roof. These are the basic parts of our picture that I will be referring to - a house, the ground, the foundation, the walls, and the roof.
If you see a crack in the wall, you could have a wall made of inferior materials. But you probably don’t have a “wall” problem. You usually have a problem in the foundation that is causing unequal amount of pressure to be placed on parts of the wall, throwing the wall out of balance and causing some parts to crack.
Perhaps you have recently decided to remodel and you have added another story to your house, but your foundation isn’t strong enough to support the additional weight. Perhaps the sand or dirt has shifted under the house. Perhaps you have a sinkhole under your house. Perhaps you have had a particularly wet year and the soil is washing out from under your foundation, leaving pockets of air and no support. Perhaps the ground wasn’t prepared properly and your swampy soil is too moist to support your house evenly. Perhaps the foundation was strong enough for one story, but not for two or more stories. All of these are foundation problems that will show up in your walls.
Each additional level of education you pursue adds another floor to your house. For example, a high school diploma creates a one story house. An Associates degree adds one story, a Bachelor’s degree adds another story, a Masters degree adds a third story, a Doctorate adds a fourth, etc. I have found
that people who make it through high school just fine and hit a wall in college usually have a slight under-functioning in their foundational cognitive skills. They may simply have some skills that are underdeveloped and are easily trained. Because it the difference between where they are functioning successfully and where they should function is so slight, it is usually quick to remedy and rebuild.
If the house is the picture of an academic career, then the roof of the house is a complex subject like algebra, chemistry, physics, an Advance Placement class, or a complicated project like a research paper or a presentation. Although big projects are not an academic class in themselves, they require students to use many lower layers of knowledge and skills to do the research, then integrate organizational skills in order to complete it on time. Any complicated project or higher level class has many parts that must be organized and understood thoroughly enough so that the thinking in the class or project is fluent. Otherwise, students struggle and require tutors to help them get through the massive amounts of material or keep up the pace of the class. If a student has struggles in these types of classes, but have never had tutoring or exerted any sort of unusual effort in the past, fairly simple organizational training, study skills, and higher level logic and reasoning skills are usually part of their treatment plan. I can form an individualized treatment plan that incorporates tutoring with Educational Therapy for a customized plan built for success.
The roof sits on top of the walls, which are academic subjects that range anywhere from Kindergarten through middle school. These are core classes like Reading, Language Arts, Geography, History, Math, Science, etc. These classes develop the basic skills that allow fluency to become developed. Often, a problem noticed at this level indicates that some foundational cognitive skill training would be beneficial. If tutoring has already been tried and has been either minimally successful or not successful at all, perhaps Educational Therapy is needed.
The walls sit upon the foundation of the house. Foundational skills include many pre-academic or non-academic skills that allow traditional academic skills to be learned with ease. Some of these foundational abilities include but are not limited to skills such as: attention & focus, visual – spatial skills, visual tracking, auditory processing, short term and long term memory, working memory, oral expression, listening comprehension, phonemic and phonological skills, and logic & reasoning skills.
Below the foundation of the house sits the earth. In our picture, the earth refers to physical & biological abilities as well as emotional abilities. If this level needs work, it is should be prepared by specialists such as Physicians, Occupational Therapists, Speech and Language Pathologists, Psychiatrists, Neurologists, Psychologists, Nutritionalists, and so on.
Just as a well trained home inspector can help a home owner find problems in their house that may not seem obvious, a well trained Educational Therapist can use tools to find out why someone is having trouble learning at a particular level. A screening, a consultation about previous testing, and / or some carefully filled out checklists can give me a lot of information. I can use this information to form a treatment plan that is customized for the needs of the individual student.
If the consultation and/or evaluation does not reveal any underlying cognitive processing problems an experienced tutor may be just what you need. Especially if you are looking for help in organizational skills, study skills, note-taking, speed reading, or FCAT prep skills. But, if you are looking for someone to connect with you on an individual needs basis, who can share insights and uncover the WHY behind your needs AND do the training in such a way that it sticks with you - then you need me.
Imagine a house. The house sits on a foundation that sits on the earth. The house has walls and a roof. These are the basic parts of our picture that I will be referring to - a house, the ground, the foundation, the walls, and the roof.
If you see a crack in the wall, you could have a wall made of inferior materials. But you probably don’t have a “wall” problem. You usually have a problem in the foundation that is causing unequal amount of pressure to be placed on parts of the wall, throwing the wall out of balance and causing some parts to crack.
Perhaps you have recently decided to remodel and you have added another story to your house, but your foundation isn’t strong enough to support the additional weight. Perhaps the sand or dirt has shifted under the house. Perhaps you have a sinkhole under your house. Perhaps you have had a particularly wet year and the soil is washing out from under your foundation, leaving pockets of air and no support. Perhaps the ground wasn’t prepared properly and your swampy soil is too moist to support your house evenly. Perhaps the foundation was strong enough for one story, but not for two or more stories. All of these are foundation problems that will show up in your walls.
Each additional level of education you pursue adds another floor to your house. For example, a high school diploma creates a one story house. An Associates degree adds one story, a Bachelor’s degree adds another story, a Masters degree adds a third story, a Doctorate adds a fourth, etc. I have found
that people who make it through high school just fine and hit a wall in college usually have a slight under-functioning in their foundational cognitive skills. They may simply have some skills that are underdeveloped and are easily trained. Because it the difference between where they are functioning successfully and where they should function is so slight, it is usually quick to remedy and rebuild.
If the house is the picture of an academic career, then the roof of the house is a complex subject like algebra, chemistry, physics, an Advance Placement class, or a complicated project like a research paper or a presentation. Although big projects are not an academic class in themselves, they require students to use many lower layers of knowledge and skills to do the research, then integrate organizational skills in order to complete it on time. Any complicated project or higher level class has many parts that must be organized and understood thoroughly enough so that the thinking in the class or project is fluent. Otherwise, students struggle and require tutors to help them get through the massive amounts of material or keep up the pace of the class. If a student has struggles in these types of classes, but have never had tutoring or exerted any sort of unusual effort in the past, fairly simple organizational training, study skills, and higher level logic and reasoning skills are usually part of their treatment plan. I can form an individualized treatment plan that incorporates tutoring with Educational Therapy for a customized plan built for success.
The roof sits on top of the walls, which are academic subjects that range anywhere from Kindergarten through middle school. These are core classes like Reading, Language Arts, Geography, History, Math, Science, etc. These classes develop the basic skills that allow fluency to become developed. Often, a problem noticed at this level indicates that some foundational cognitive skill training would be beneficial. If tutoring has already been tried and has been either minimally successful or not successful at all, perhaps Educational Therapy is needed.
The walls sit upon the foundation of the house. Foundational skills include many pre-academic or non-academic skills that allow traditional academic skills to be learned with ease. Some of these foundational abilities include but are not limited to skills such as: attention & focus, visual – spatial skills, visual tracking, auditory processing, short term and long term memory, working memory, oral expression, listening comprehension, phonemic and phonological skills, and logic & reasoning skills.
Below the foundation of the house sits the earth. In our picture, the earth refers to physical & biological abilities as well as emotional abilities. If this level needs work, it is should be prepared by specialists such as Physicians, Occupational Therapists, Speech and Language Pathologists, Psychiatrists, Neurologists, Psychologists, Nutritionalists, and so on.
Just as a well trained home inspector can help a home owner find problems in their house that may not seem obvious, a well trained Educational Therapist can use tools to find out why someone is having trouble learning at a particular level. A screening, a consultation about previous testing, and / or some carefully filled out checklists can give me a lot of information. I can use this information to form a treatment plan that is customized for the needs of the individual student.
If the consultation and/or evaluation does not reveal any underlying cognitive processing problems an experienced tutor may be just what you need. Especially if you are looking for help in organizational skills, study skills, note-taking, speed reading, or FCAT prep skills. But, if you are looking for someone to connect with you on an individual needs basis, who can share insights and uncover the WHY behind your needs AND do the training in such a way that it sticks with you - then you need me.