Parent & Child

Educational Therapy… A Hope for Struggling Learners

October 2007

Educational therapy discovers and then addresses the root causes of learning disabilities, processing deficits and missing pre-skills.  Anyone struggling to learn or function in the classroom setting or in the workplace would benefit. When children continue to struggle despite parent- teacher intervention, they should be evaluated for underlying learning deficits. Usually learning problems are not outgrown and often develop into social and emotional challenges.

A comprehensive educational assessment demystifies learning problems –a great benefit to the individual, parent and teacher. In addition, identifying the client’s strengths is encouraging. Often, the individual is privately feeling “stupid.” People with learning disabilities often have average to superior intelligence. Many are gifted in specific areas. However, their tremendous strengths are offset by noticeable weaknesses - inability to read or write well, memory and/ or organization issues, and difficulty understanding what is heard or seen. These difficulties stem, not from a physical problem with the eyes or ears, but from the basic neurological functioning of the brain.

Educational therapy differs from tutoring in that it is based on neurodevelopment whereas tutoring focuses on re-teaching academic subjects. Compensations such as classroom modifications, verbal tests and reduced workload are the most common approach for students with learning challenges. This allows students some level of success with outside help, but often leaves them limited in what they can handle on their own. 

Educational therapy develops underlying learning skills such as visual and auditory processing, focusing, organization and memory development, listening comprehension, and application of learned material. Specific areas of the brain responsible for these skills are exercised and like sets muscles respond to use and disuse. Recent research verifies this concept even in the elderly. Deficit stimulation, through educational therapy, allows students the eventual freedom of succeeding on their own as independent learners.