ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 presents three essential operations that define the art of the therapeutic interaction in educational therapy: Frontloading the Task, Promoting Analytic Questioning, and Giving Informative Feedback. All three illustrate how we construct academic interventions to support school learning, and how the therapeutic processes build client strength through customized learning tasks. Frontloading involves preparing our clients to learn, through analysis of the task components, and analysis of the client’s personal readiness, strengths, and needs. Both explicit and implicit approaches to frontloading are presented. Promoting Analytic Questioning examines reasons that our clients might be unwilling to ask questions, and proposes systematic approaches to help them understand the purposes and structures of questioning in the school setting. Questioning develops a form of engagement that is often outside the realm and experience of the struggling learner. The use of questioning can help to develop an “inquiry” habit of mind. Informative Feedback is perhaps the backbone of the therapeutic interaction, for it involves the manner in which the ET observes, labels, and communicates all aspects of the client’s ongoing learning processes as these processes emerge in the therapist/client dynamic. We use this form of explicit feedback to call our clients’ attention to cognitive skills and other strengths of which they may be unaware, to promote greater metacognitive awareness of learning strategies.
