The educational therapist is NOT a tutor. Ed therapists do not teach content. That remains the role of the teacher/parent team. Instead, Ed therapists focus on the child and the learning needs and difficulties of the child and then develop strategies and utilize both tools and techniques of learning which allow the child to circumvent learning deficits and find achievement.

No two children are the same and often children with learning delays are placed into categories based upon the discipline, training and specialization of the professional who diagnoses the child. Labels are not effective substitutes for a multidisciplinary evaluation and in most cases, no single issue is responsible for the delay. No single solution is therefore ideal for attacking the problems. The solution may involve multiple, concurrent treatment approaches involving a mixture of disciplines.

Often times, learning issues manifested in the classroom are actually behaviors in response to undiagnosed underlying weaknesses. Children who express negative attitudes about reading or who display an unwillingness to go to school, may be acting out of frustration over tasks that they find extremely difficult and that may have been improperly diagnosed and aren't being addressed. As an example, Dyslexia is often felt to be the cause of reading difficulties yet such issues can just as often be attributed to  visual - spatial impairments, eye control problems or poor eyesight. These might not be addressable without vision therapy, glasses or visual training and may have nothing to do with dyslexia per se.

Language impaired children with reading disabilities cannot be effectively tested with performance instruments that rely upon a language foundation. An educational therapist will recommend appropriate testing tools to evaluate the child. Failure to use the right performance test can result in misdiagnosing conditions as wide ranging as Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Aspberger's syndrome.