Introduction

Educational therapy is a “work in progress.” A brief history is given of its origins in Clinical Teaching in the 150 years of special education, and its subsequent development into a profession that attracts practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds: special education, regular education, speech and language, clinical and educational psychology, neuropsychology, marriage and family counseling, and educational consulting. The contributions to educational therapy from such related fields as executive function, neuroscience, and neuropsychology have enriched our ability to reach and treat clients with a wide range of learning issues. The Best Practices approach focuses upon the literacy skills of reading, writing, and critical thinking, but the educational therapy lens can be applied broadly to other fields of learning, to include the workplace. The need for well-trained educational therapists is ongoing, and the application opportunities offer a bright future. Each chapter is reviewed briefly to place the chapter contents in the context of the literacy skills, and to indicate the client population for whom these approaches are intended.