FAQ's

Can the Educational Therapy Center’s tutoring programs work for students without a diagnosis of dyslexia? Our program is for any student who struggles with reading, writing, spelling, fluency or comprehension. The diagnostics give insight into a student’s difficulty and are encouraged, but not required.

What makes Educational Therapy Center different from other tutoring services?
The use of multisensory techniques separates us from other tutoring services. Students use the visual, auditory, tactile and kinesthetic pathways to learn and reinforce letter sounds. Combining these learning pathways helps students retain the information in their long term memory, for a lifetime of use. This methodology is especially useful to a student who has not learned in the traditional way, despite their best efforts and the best efforts of their educators. The instruction directly teaches concepts versus implying the information. Our tutors follow a scope and sequence to ensure all the necessary rules of our language are taught, but pace it to the student’s abilities. The same is true for our math instruction.

Also, our tutors ensure that a student’s phonological awareness skills are strong. This auditory component is often the missing key to literacy skills. As we build these skills, the phonics rules make more sense to our students. At the Educational Therapy Center, we do remediation which means we re-teach the missing skills in a multisensory and logical way, not more of the same at a slower pace.

What is Orton-Gillingham? The Orton-Gillingham Approach focuses on the learning needs of the individual student. It is a direct and structured system used to teach reading and spelling with built in flexibility for the students’ needs. If a student already understands a concept, it can be treated differently than a brand new topic. The multisensory lessons and phonics based teaching give tools to the students who have not learned by conventional methods.  The logic of the English language is much higher than most people believe it to be. OG has incorporated a wide body of time-tested knowledge and practice that has been in use for 79 years. Most people have not been taught the rules of our language, which is actually 80% regular, much higher than many people think. OG also addresses the written components with recognition of the parts of speech, good sentence construction and paragraph writing. Find out more about our Teaching Methods.

Where does the tutor meet with the student? Most tutors meet with students at our office in Parkville, Missouri. Special arrangements can be made to meet at another safe location, such as a library or school. In such instances a travel fee may be charged.

How long before tutoring is completed? Because each student comes to us with varying skill levels and learning abilities, it is difficult to determine a time for completion of our program. Estimates range from 100 to 250 hours of tutoring.

What are the qualifications of your tutors? Educational Therapy Center tutors have a college degree or specialized training besides the 40 hours of training in the Orton-Gillingham Approach. Tutors then complete 10-20 practicum hours with a master teacher. On-going continuing education is also a part of our tutor training program on a bi-monthly basis.