There is always a thrill, a sense of energy, when we get to start something new. I try and make myself absolutely open and mark the experience when I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to stumble across a novel learning moment in my path. In any profession (in any life, actually), we run the risk of making ourselves immune to novelty in the experience of practice; the sense of daily reruns is hard to avoid. I am not sure how I found the key words 'Educational Therapy', or what exactly I was searching for when they came up. I wish I did - I feel that I missed a life altering experience passing in a nano-moment on Google. I imagine I was trolling for new literature in the usual reflexive way that we look for news (sadly, I could have been wasting away on BuzzFeed, the new porn), but I came upon the Association of Educational Therapists instead. I spent the next two hours reading through the journals and newsletters, absolutely absorbed. It was like turning a corner in a well-travelled city and finding yourself in a neighborhood that speaks your unique dialect and recognizes your particular holidays. They even look like you. Finally - someone to talk to!
The really crazy bit is that I think of myself as unique in my training, always a bit of an outlier in my professional setting. Either a psychologist among teachers or a teacher among psychologists, student-centered in a content-driven setting (university) or a therapist in an educational setting (schools). Now I know what I am: an Educational Therapist. My work emanates from a brain-based psychological theoretical foundation in a cognitive framework that is oriented to developing each individual's ability to learn in any context (I call that self-regulation in a cognitive setting, but whatever). I have found a domain at last, which sounds ridiculously abstract except to develop in our practice we must have community. Anyone who deals with the continuous sea change of human performance has to battle to keep the knowledge tank filled, to kill an analogy, or face a stalled engine. I have become expert at making things over to work for me, whether neurological findings or classroom practice techniques based on active research. In the ET Journals, I found practitioners just like myself weaving a dance between research and practice, with evidence-based strategies applied to real outcomes. This is akin to discovering the original land bridge - this is where all the action is, theoretically speaking.
So why does this matter now, after 25 years of practice, in classrooms and labs? I promised myself that I would take time to write, to try and open up and explore some of the experiences that I have filed away to the light of day and apply them to practice so someone else can make use of them before they wither away. Why change course now? Why, when the public education system is falling away by pieces like a derelict house and the private sector is widening the privilege gap by the second? Why, when retention rates at universities across North America are reporting 20% losses after the first year (First Year Experience, anyone?) and high schools are releasing more students without completing their Dogwood (17% 2010 in BC)? Because the market is growing for people who need help beyond the public and private education sectors - they need an alternative. I have been thinking about what that might look like for some time - now I know.
I am starting a private practice now, taking a leap from the academic to the practical world. I am going to use educational therapy as my bridge. I am going to create a space where a community of educators can come together and create any kind of learning program that they believe might help an individual master their own learning process, with other professionals to support their efforts. We will be outside the system but there to support the system; free to try any research-based and data-driven methods we find useful and interesting. Educational Therapy came into my life at just the right time...
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