Tutoring vs. Therapy/Intervention
- aburns22
- Mar 17
- 2 min read
When seeking help for a child who has dyslexia, it is important to discriminate between those who provide tutoring and those who provide intervention/therapy.
While both tutors and interventionists work to support and advance learning, tutors typically focus on general academic support that helps a student understand current classroom assignments, keep up with homework, and master immediate classroom demands. Interventionists/therapists focus on the underlying root cause of the child's difficulty (dyslexia) and tailor instruction using specialized techniques and strategies. This highly research-based and specialized instruction specifically targets the language-based disorder of dyslexia that is neurobiological in origin. Tutoring typically involves utilizing a student's classroom material, while intervention utilizes specialized programs that require hours of extra training to provide with fidelity.
Focus of tutoring: providing supplemental instruction and filling learning gaps; helping students catch up, stay on track, and improve understanding of school-based curriculum.
Focus of intervention: identifying root cause of learning difficulty and providing specialized instruction and targeted interventions to improve foundational skills; filling-in the gaps to help students catch-up with grade-level reading and spelling requirements at each child's unique pace
Tutoring is a wonderful and crucial area for student improvement, and extremely qualified teachers and individuals with Masters's-level education often provide this service, but it's important to remember that if you are looking for help for a child with dyslexia, you need an individual who provides therapy specific to dyslexia, with specialized training in intervention techniques.
**A neurobiological language-based disorder is not created equal to a student with other learning needs.
Other differences to be aware of:
COST: when seeking a therapist/interventionist, the cost for services will be higher than those of a tutor due to the materials needed to provide the therapy and the extra training necessary to be an interventionist.
FREQUENCY: intervention should be consistent so that skills taught are not lost. If too many breaks are taken during the process due to sports or other scheduling conflicts, progress will be slow. Tutoring is able to be more sporadic as it typically involves current school-based curriculum.
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