Coaching Bridges a Gap for Educational Therapists?
When I was a classroom teacher, I didn’t have a good sense of all the other professions that support students outside of the classroom.
Turns out there are soooooo many different kinds of educators who work outside of the school system, but contribute significantly to helping students succeed.
Academic coaching was one of the professions that wasn’t initially on my radar. Another profession that was a mystery to me was “educational therapy.”
My first experiences with students transitioning from educational therapy
The first time I heard of educational therapy was after I had transitioned from teaching to academic coaching (the story of how that happened will have to be told another time, but it’s a good one!).
A mother reached out to me to inquire about whether my academic coaching services would help her daughter. In our initial conversation, the mom set the following context:
“My daughter has been working with an educational therapist for the last year, and she learned some good things about working with her dyslexia, but the person we were working with couldn’t seem to help her with the ongoing academic and organizational issues she is having at school. We are hoping you can help with that!”
Indeed I could!
This student eventually booked my services, and we worked together successfully for two years. Together we worked on all the standard academic coaching tasks:
Setting up and maintaining a planner,
Establish time management and organization routines,
Better understand her procrastinating tendencies and learn how to interrupt them, and
Study skills, including note-taking, reading efficiently, making quizzable study tools, and creating effective, solid plans.
Basically, we worked on all the skills I teach educators to teach students inside the Anti-boring Learning Lab.
I probably would have quickly forgotten about “educational therapy” as a thing, except a funny thing started happening — more and more clients started coming to me, saying they weren’t getting the support they needed from educational therapists, and could I work with them instead?
What’s the difference between academic coaching and ed therapy?
I became so curious: what exactly is an educational therapist? What are they trained to do, and why is it that my coaching services were filling holes in the educational therapist’s toolkit?
I went to the Internet to try and solve this mystery, but the information I found didn’t help solve my conundrum.
Take this excerpt from an article posted on the the Child-Mind Institute:
Educational therapists, ETs for short, come from lots of different backgrounds. Some are psychologists, while others work in special ed or speech and language training. But all of them are there not only to help your child succeed in school, but also to find their love for learning again.
An ET will figure out what’s standing in your kid’s way. And they’ll look at behaviors your kid may have developed to hide their issues. For example, they might throw a tantrum to avoid starting homework because they know it’s going to be frustrating.
This description confused me because it sounds like an ET does exactly what an academic coach does. Compare the above to my standard explanation of what academic coaching is:
Imagine you’re struggling in your math class. Your teacher is lecturing about the Pythagorean theorum and you just don’t get it. A tutor would help explain the content to you in a new way, intending that you might understand it better this time. As an academic coach, I get interested in what makes it hard for you to learn in the first place? Are you having a hard time paying attention in class? Do you know how to use your textbook or other tools? Is something else getting in the way of your learning?
Can you see how this description of academic coaching seems much like the way the Child Mind Institute describes educational therapy?
As I continued to research, the only thing I could really understand about the difference was educational therapists go through an entire graduate program to get their degree, whereas I, as an academic coach, attended a few trainings and then learned on the job.
How could it be that the educational therapists my clients had been seeing could not support them the way I could?!
Clearly, there was something I still didn’t understand about what educational therapists do, and what in types of circumstances a student would be better served by an ET versus a coach, and vice versa.
The “toolkit approach” versus the “curriculum approach”
A new clue came to me a few years later. By this point, I’d started training educators my Anti-Boring Student Success Toolkit, via a course I called The Art of Inspiring Students.
An ed therapist joined a cohort, and I was excited to get to know more about her profession through her participation in our course.
However, I remained confused. She found the Anti-Boring Toolkit supremely helpful, and often told stories of how students were responding so positively to the new tools she was sharing with them, and how they filled the gaps in her own education.
However, she continuously voiced frustration that I didn’t provide a curriculum she could walk her students through. She would have loved a set of clear lesson plans for what to teach first, second, and third.
I wondered if this was another distinction between educational therapy and academic coaching. Perhaps ed therapists are trained in a variety of protocols they need to walk students through step-by-step to improve different cognitive and learning processes?
Although I certainly understand the power of protocols delivered in a specific order to improve students’ abilities (what I call a “curriculum approach”), I also feel strongly that academic coaches use what I call a “toolkit approach.”
I suggest academic coaches focus on filling their Toolkits with a variety of strategies that solve the problems students experience at school.
With the Toolkit approach, educators focus first on connecting with the student to understand their school-related problems from the student’s point of view. The next step is to pull out a tool or two from their toolkit that might best solve that problem.
The Anti-Boring Learning Lab micro-credentials and training calls are structured to ensure that participants exercise the art and skill of:
(1) listening deeply to students,
(2) choosing a few tools that might help,
(3) getting consent to teach those tools, and then
(4) helping students experiment with the tools until they find one that works, and then
(5) develop habits and routines for incorporating that tool effectively into their academic life.
I’m incredibly proud that our “Toolkit Approach” to teaching educators gets results for students. Cindy Palmer of Threshold Coaches recently confirmed the power of this approach in her own learning:
I have never seen someone teach content in such a way that requires so much of the learner, ensuring that they not only know the content but are able to apply it in impactful ways.
This is a rave review! Cindy is not only working through the Anti-Boring credentials herself, but she also requires that all the coaches on her staff complete the training too. I’m deeply honored, not just by her trust but also her acknowledgment about how much I ask of the learner to truly “show what they know.”
Bridging the gap
Fast-forward to today. The course formerly known as The Art of Inspiring Students is now rebranded into the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, where we now house micro-credentials instead of a course, and we are also a thriving professional learning community for educators of all stripes.
This includes, of course, a growing number of educational therapists. One of them, Rebecca Bollar of NeuroAide, just emailed me after finishing the first three of nine micro-credentials in our training program:
I am really enjoying the content in the Learning Lab so far. These methods are what my practice has been missing.
The focus of my practice is building students’ underlying cognitive processes. I offer interventions for integrating primitive reflexes, strengthening processing skills, auditory development, and building foundational reading skills.
For my high and middle school students, I always felt I was missing something... I was not quite bridging the gap between the work we do in our sessions and their school work.
I am excited to really dive into these lessons with my student's in the Fall because I am hopeful they will be the link I have been missing. I only wish I found this material sooner!
Rebecca’s wonderful email finally helped me fully understand the work that educational therapists are trained to do — building students’ learning capacity by working on the underlying processes, cognitive and otherwise, that support the tasks they need to do as students.
It sounds like what she was missing was the tools to help them put that learning capacity into action in the practical day-to-day learning needs of a student. It sounds like her training didn’t necessarily support her in bridging the gap between the work she and her students did in sessions versus the work required of the students at school.
I’m thrilled that she sees so much value in what she’s learning, and I hope that next school year we’ll be able to post more of our members’ success stories with students on this blog, for everyone to enjoy.
Want a taste of the Anti-Boring Toolkit?
If you’re just learning about our work in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab, and are curious to get a free taste of it, I recommend you sign up for our FREE Unlock Student Learning course. I’m also hopeful we’ll be able to learn more as a community from the unique skills that the ed therapists bring to the mix!
In the free courseou’ll learn two foundational coaching tools in our Toolkit: The Study Cycle and the Consent Burger. These include our best tools for teaching
(1) the least students need to know to get into effective action, and
(2) the least you need to say to teach it to them!
You’re also free to stop by the next FREE Office Hours and ask me any questions you have after working through the Unlock Student Learning course. I hope I get to see you there!
Also, if you have any follow-up thoughts about the intersections and differences between educational therapists and academic coaches, please post below! I’m all ears.
P.S. This post has generated a lot of private conversations! I’m fascinated to hear from other educators who also have been confused about what exactly educational therapists do. So apparently I’m not alone!
I also brought up the discussion in our latest Anti-Boring Learning Lab community call, and one of our members added some super helpful information. Because of the courses ET’s are required to take in graduate school, many are able to do some psychoeducational testing of students. This is definitely something I, as an academic coach, am not qualified to do.
ET’s also have taken courses on a variety of learning disabilities, and have many more concrete interventions than I do to address math and reading difficulties in students. These interventions are likely what I’ve referred to as a “curriculum” that they walk students through, like Orton Gillingham, for example. I’m certainly not qualified to work with students with this level of detail to help them develop these important and specific academic capacities.
Please keep the comments coming! This discussion is really helping me understand where the overlaps and distinctions are between academic coaching and educational therapy, and I’m grateful to those who have engaged me on the topic.