What's the difference between tutoring and educational therapy?

Speaker: Ann Lyke, MEd, Educational Specialist

Ann Lyke, MEd: Hi, I'm Ann Lyke, an education specialist at Children's Health Council (CHC). One of the common questions we're often asked is what's the difference between tutoring and educational therapy? Tutoring more often focuses on skills that are needed to learn about and improve grades in a specific subject. It's more content driven, such as biology or history. Educational therapy has a broader focus on developing foundational skills such as phonics, reading, spelling, grammar, math calculation abilities. These are the skills that are needed to be able to then later easily and successfully learn that content area. Often times educational therapy will also help kids learn how they learn. What are their processes and strengths and challenges that can help or get in the way of learning? These would be things like organization, being able to pay attention to task, problem solve and sequence how they're doing things. These are all things that educational therapy can help with.