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Educational Therapy Session Notes: What the Codes Require

Writer: Andrea Chernin
Andrea Chernin
Oct 16
18 min read

Educational Therapy Session Notes: What the Codes Require

The short version


Five professional codes govern the people who do this work, and every one of them tells you to keep accurate records. Not one of them tells you what a record is.


No code names a required field. No code names a format. No code names a frequency. No code defines a session note, and four of the five never use the phrase at all. The sixth document that does define what to write about a client in detail, with a scoring rubric and a page count, is a certification exam you sit once.


And the one place the profession's own body puts a number on documentation is a rule explaining that the time you spend on it does not count.

Every code says keep records, and none says what a record is


Start with the sentence each body actually wrote, because the gap between them is smaller than you would expect and the gap between all of them and a blank page is enormous.


The Association of Educational Therapists publishes its Code of Ethics, Revision #9, 2025 as a PDF, and it runs to roughly three thousand words. Across the whole document, the word documentation appears zero times. So does note. So does notes. So does session note. So does progress report. The word progress appears exactly once.


The word record appears twice and records once, and all three sit inside the same subclause. It is II.I.M.4, and it is nested under a section about malware, cookies and cloud storage:


follow current environmental protection guidelines and relevant statutes and regulations related to record retention and disposal of records and electronics and take steps to prevent data leaks and unauthorized access to confidential information when disposing of electronic devices.

Read that again with the nesting in mind. AET's only reference to client records in its entire ethics code is a subclause about what to do when you throw away a laptop. It defers the substance to statute and stops.


The nearest thing to a records obligation elsewhere in the document is II.I.N, which asks practitioners to establish baseline data about new clients and maintain accurate data for decision making and consultation.


Its first subclause, II.I.N.1, asks you to establish ways to measure client progress toward goals at regular intervals. That is the single appearance of the word progress in the code, and it governs measurement, not reporting. Nobody is named as the recipient.


ASHA: records must be timely, and that is the end of it


The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Code of Ethics, 2023, carries the records provisions as two separate rules under Principle of Ethics I.


Rule O requires that practitioners protect the confidentiality and security of records of professional services provided, and allows access only where legally authorized or required. Rule Q requires that individuals maintain timely records, accurately record and bill for services provided, and not misrepresent services provided.


Timely and accurate. That is the whole specification. The code says nothing about what the record contains, and nothing about how long it is kept.


A note on our own previous description of this: earlier posts on this site have referred to ASHA's records provisions as Rules O and P. Rule P is a confidentiality rule about information concerning persons served, not a records rule. The rule requiring timely records is Rule Q. The correction is ours.


CEC: accurate records, in a section about case management


The Council for Exceptional Children publishes twelve ethical principles and nine sections of professional practice standards. Records appear in the Case Management section, whose first standard asks practitioners to maintain accurate student records and ensure appropriate confidentiality standards are in place and enforced.


Its third standard asks for accurate student and program data provided to administrators, colleagues and parents. Its fourth repeats the confidentiality formula familiar from AET: maintain confidentiality except where information is released under specific conditions of written consent.


Accurate. Again, no field list, no format, no frequency.


A second correction while we are here. This site has previously cited CEC's records standard as 8.1. CEC's published standards are organised by named section rather than by that numbering, and the records standard sits as the first item under Case Management. If you are quoting CEC in a practice document, quote the section name.


APA: the only body with a real specification, and it has expired


The American Psychological Association is the outlier, and the way it is an outlier is the most interesting fact in this whole area.


APA's Ethics Code, adopted 2002 and carrying the 2010 amendments, handles documentation in two standards. 6.01 covers the creation and maintenance of records and gives the reasons for them: facilitating later services, allowing research replication, meeting institutional requirements, ensuring billing accuracy and ensuring legal compliance.


6.02 covers maintaining confidentiality in creating, storing, accessing, transferring and disposing of records, in any medium. 4.04 adds that written and oral reports should include only information germane to the purpose of the communication.


That is still a purpose statement rather than a specification. The specification lives in a separate document, and APA is the only body in this group to have written one: the Record Keeping Guidelines, approved by APA's Council of Representatives on 16 February 2007.


Those guidelines have twelve numbered sections. The second is titled Content of records, and it is the closest thing to a field list anyone in this landscape has published. It asks the practitioner to maintain accurate, current and pertinent records of professional services, and says records include information such as the nature, delivery, progress and results of services, and related fees.


Its application section asks the practitioner to weigh the nature of the service, the source of the information recorded, the intended use of the records and their professional obligations.


That is useful. Three things about it are not.


First, the document says it is not binding. Its own preamble draws the line explicitly:


Guidelines differ from standards in that standards are mandatory and may be accompanied by an enforcement mechanism. Guidelines are aspirational in intent.

It goes on to say that guidelines are not intended to be mandatory or exhaustive and may not be applicable to every professional situation.


Second, the document set its own expiry date, and the date has passed. The guidelines state that they are scheduled to expire ten years from 16 February 2007, and that after that date users are encouraged to contact the APA Practice Directorate to determine whether the document remains in effect. That is February 2017.


Third, APA has since archived it. The page hosting the guidelines carries a notice that it has been archived and is no longer being updated regularly, and records that the guidelines were archived by Council in August 2019. APA's Division 16 published a call for nominations in May 2025 for a work group to update and revise the guidelines, and stated the position plainly:


The most recent APA record keeping guidelines have expired as policy.

So the only detailed, field-level record-keeping specification published by any body in this landscape is aspirational by its own terms, past its own stated expiry, formally archived by its publisher, and the subject of a revision that was still being staffed last year.


ICF: one sentence, handed to the law


The International Coaching Federation Code of Ethics has a single records provision, 2.4, which asks the coach to maintain, store and dispose of any records, including electronic files and communications, in a manner that protects confidentiality, security and privacy and complies with applicable laws and agreements.


One sentence. Neither notes nor documentation appears anywhere in the code. Section 2.5 of the published code extends the same obligations across technology systems, databases, platforms, software and artificial intelligence, which is the most current language any of the five carries, and it still specifies nothing about content.


If you are working out which of these bodies governs you in the first place, the credential landscape is laid out in the pillar comparing educational therapists, learning specialists and executive function coaches and in the scope map of the educational therapist role.

The pattern, and it is the same evasion as consent


If this looks familiar, it is because we have been here before. The post on informed consent, assent and confidentiality across five codes found that all five codes require consent machinery and almost none of them define it, and that every one hands the hard part to statute without saying what the statute says.


Documentation is the same shape, with one addition. On consent, at least two of the five codes specify acts and documentation of those acts. On records, every single one of them stops at an adjective. Confidential. Secure. Timely. Accurate. Current. Pertinent.


Adjectives are not specifications. You cannot audit a note against the word accurate.


And there is a reason the codes behave this way, which APA stated in print nearly twenty years ago while explaining why it had written guidelines at all. Its background section records that the committee surveyed state laws and regulations related to record keeping by psychologists and found them to be vague and to vary substantially across jurisdictions.


That is the professional body saying, on the record, that the statute it defers to does not answer the question either.


This is the point to be explicit about scope. How long you must keep a client file, what a state's licensing board requires of a licensed practitioner, what a school district's contract obliges you to hand over, and what any insurer requires in order to pay are all questions of law and contract rather than professional ethics.


Every code in this post routes them outward, and so does this post. Nothing here is legal advice. Those questions belong with an attorney licensed in your state, and for anything touching a school's own statutory machinery, with your state education agency.

The one place AET specifies what to write, and it is an exam


Here is where this stops being a story about absence.


AET does prescribe, in detail, what a written record of a client should contain. It does it in the Board Certified Educational Therapist case study, the first step toward board certification, and the specification is a scored rubric.


The case study guide carries a mandatory outline, Form C, with six sections and a hundred points distributed across them:


  • Presenting problem, 5 points. The primary concern, why this client is a candidate for educational therapy rather than another intervention, and the referral source.

  • Background information, 15 points. Objective data including date of birth, age, gender identity, brief physical description and school grade; relevant cultural and socioeconomic context where it influenced your choices; a description of the client's personality, affect and feelings about school and their own abilities; and the intervention start and end date, frequency, duration and approximate total number of sessions. Then significant factors from birth, health and developmental history, behavioural characteristics, family history, school history, and other interventions recommended or provided. Then a summary of interviews with teachers, therapists and other specialists.

  • Assessment, 25 points. Formal and informal evaluation techniques described; outside formal assessment data reported separately and synthesised by the applicant; all results reported using actual test scores with related discussion and the age at testing; then a detailed explanation, from the data, of why educational therapy was needed, the goals, how the assessment data informed both academic and non-academic goals, and any other recommendations and referrals with their results.

  • Psychoeducational interventions, 40 points, the largest block. A detailed account of the academic approach, addressing no more than three domains; and an in-depth description of one or more psychosocial, behavioural or case management interventions, with how that area was affecting progress.

  • Closing remarks, 10 points. Present status; how the interventions may or may not have affected outcomes; a review of pre- and post- quantifiable data; and qualitative information including client self-report and parent comments.

  • Overall writing, 5 points.


The formatting is specified too: twelve to twenty-four double-spaced pages, numbered, twelve-point font, test data tables in an appendix and referenced from the narrative. The guide states that case studies which deviate from the outline will be returned for rewriting.


One instruction from the preparation notes deserves lifting out, because it is the only place in this entire landscape where a professional body states a standard of proof for a progress claim:


You must have objective documentation of the client's progress. This could be in the form of post test scores, informal assessments, as well as academic grades. It is not enough to simply state that the client made great progress, as the readers will be looking for documentation which supports your conclusion.

That is a real standard. It is also, as published, a standard for an application rather than for a practice. The same body's code of ethics, which governs every working day, contains no equivalent sentence.


The case study also sets conditions that tell you what AET thinks a documentable case looks like: you must have worked with the client for at least twelve months, and the case must include formal normative testing with both cognitive and academic measures, the cognitive testing completed by a qualified professional.


What you may do with that outside testing once you have it is the subject of the post on reading a psychoeducational evaluation, and the purchase-eligibility rules that decide which of those measures you can buy at all are in the post on achievement test qualification levels.


The de-identification rules are the usable part


The case study's confidentiality instructions are the one piece of this that transfers directly to a practice document, because they are a concrete de-identification standard rather than an adjective.


All identifying information about the client and the context must be eliminated. Names of clients, schools and other professionals must be changed to initials. Geography must be referred to in general terms, such as a Midwest urban area or a West coast suburb. The candidate's own name must not appear on any page of the case study. Failure to remove specific references prevents the committee from reviewing the application at all.


If you are ever asked to share a case for supervision, consultation, a conference presentation or a referral letter, that is a published, enforced standard from your own professional body, and it is more specific than anything in the code of ethics.

The one number AET puts on documentation says it does not count


The sharpest finding in this post is not about what the documents require. It is about how the profession accounts for the time.


AET's supervision guidelines, in the revision dated 2026, set supervision at a one-to-ten ratio: one hour of supervision for every ten hours of direct service. The packet then lists what counts as direct service, and it attaches two parenthetical exclusions:


Individual sessions of remediation or teaching with students who are the focus of supervision. (Note: this does NOT include time spent on review of records.)

Individual sessions of assessment. (Note: this does NOT include time spent on report preparation.)

So the only place AET quantifies documentation anywhere in its published rules is a pair of notes establishing that reading a file and writing a report are not practice. The hours you spend on them do not count toward the fifteen hundred direct service hours the ET/P application requires, and they do not count toward the thousand hours the board certification route requires.


That is not an unreasonable accounting rule. Direct service hours are meant to measure time with a client. But it is worth seeing clearly what the published record adds up to: the body sets no standard for your notes, and separately rules that the time you spend writing them is not part of your practice.


What AET does require you to log, by name, is your time. The supervision packet states that the supervisee must keep an accurate timesheet to log client hours and supervision meetings. The ET/P application requires documentation of at least fifteen hundred direct service hours completed within the past ten years, plus verification letters from all supervisors.


The full comparison of how six different bodies count supervised hours is in the post on supervision requirements, and the route through the credentials is in how to become an educational therapist.


Where the phrase finally appears


Across AET's Code of Ethics, its Fact Sheet, its ET/P application and its supervision packet, the phrase session notes appears exactly once.


It is on the supervision packet's Documentation of Supervised Hours form, inside a worked example of how to fill in a row. The sample entry under Topics Discussed reads: direct service hour review, reviewed session notes from direct service hours, discussed client progress and plans for next session.


The only appearance of the term in AET's published documents is an illustration on a form that a supervisor signs.


The same packet's supervision competency checklist is more substantive, and it does treat documentation as something a supervisee is meant to be taught. Among the competencies a supervisor can mark off are organizing documentation, maintaining communication logs, and communicating progress clearly. So the expectation exists, is supervised, and is never defined.

What this leaves you to decide, and the order to decide it in


Because no code specifies a format, the honest answer to "what should my session note contain" is that it is your decision, and the documents give you a sequence for making it rather than a template. Four questions, in this order.


1. Who could read this, and under what circumstances? This is the only question the codes answer in unison. Every one of the five requires confidentiality and security, and every one of them permits release under written consent or legal compulsion.


That means the note you write is a note that a parent may ask for, that a successor practitioner may inherit, that a school team may see, and that a court may compel.


Write it knowing all four readers are possible. The machinery for the consent half of that is covered in the informed consent post, which sets out who has to agree before anything is shared.


2. What decision will this note support? APA's expired guidelines are at their most useful here, because the reasons they give for keeping records are reasons a private practitioner shares: continuity of care if you are unavailable, assisting collaborating professionals, documenting decision making in higher-risk situations, and being able to answer a complaint. A note that records what you did and not why you did it fails three of those four.


3. What does your own plan say you are tracking? This is the question AET II.I.N.1 actually puts to you: you are asked to establish ways to measure progress toward goals at regular intervals. The goals come from the plan, so the note's data fields come from the plan too.


If your treatment plan names a measurable goal, the note records the measure. If it does not, the note has nothing to record and the problem is upstream.


4. What will you not write down? APA 4.04 and the case study's de-identification rules point the same way: include only what is germane to the purpose. A clinical-sounding inference you are not qualified to draw is a liability in a document that may be read by anyone on the list in question one.


The boundary between what you may interpret and what you must refer out is drawn, inconsistently, across five professional bodies' scope documents, and the flat answer to whether you may identify a disability from a report you have read is no.


What none of this gives you is permission to write less. The absence of a standard is not the absence of exposure.

Progress reports: the only defined obligation is somebody else's


Session notes are internal. A progress report goes to a family, and that is where the asymmetry gets sharp.


In the school system, periodic progress reporting is a defined obligation with defined machinery. The IRIS Center's materials on monitoring progress toward IEP goals describe it that way: data are collected on each goal regularly, plotted on the student's graph as they are collected, and reported to parents periodically.


Quarterly reports, or reports timed to coincide with report cards, are the examples those materials give. They are written about IEPs, and the obligation they describe is the school's.


No code governing private educational therapy practice names a reporting frequency, a recipient or a format. AET asks you to measure progress at regular intervals and does not say who hears about it.


CEC asks for accurate data provided to administrators, colleagues and parents, inside a section written for a case manager in a school. ICF requires a clear agreement about what information is exchanged and how, which converts the question into a contract term rather than answering it.


So the private practitioner inherits the expectation without the specification. The practical consequence is that your service agreement is the document that settles it, and it is worth settling it there rather than discovering the family's assumption in month four. The post on starting a private practice covers what AET requires a contract to state.


The measurement side is a different problem, and it is solvable


Deciding how often to report is a contracting question. Deciding what the numbers in the report mean is a measurement question, and the published record on that side is much richer than the record on documentation.


The mechanics IRIS describes are usable on their own terms. Take three probes in about a week to establish a baseline, or use the last three data points if the student is already being monitored. Draw a goal line from the median of those three baseline scores to the goal.


Collect at regular intervals, weekly or every two weeks, and at least weekly for students with severe and persistent difficulties. Plot each score as it arrives and connect it to the previous point, with a vertical dashed line separating baseline from intervention and no line connecting across it.


Which instrument you use for those probes, and what its own publisher permits a private practitioner to do with it, is the subject of the post on progress monitoring tools compared. How often the program manual says to deliver the intervention in the first place is covered in intervention session frequency and duration.


And before a number goes into a report at all, two things are worth knowing about it. A standard score carries an error band whose width the report may not print, which is the subject of the post on the standard error of measurement.


And a grade equivalent is the single most misread figure a family will see, for reasons the publishers themselves state. If the instrument's norms are old enough, the comparison behind the score is a different question again, covered in what actually makes a score too old.


A progress report that prints a point estimate with no band, against norms whose age is not stated, is accurate in the sense the codes require and misleading in the sense a family will read.

When several organisations share a vocabulary


The phrase accurate records appears in AET's code, CEC's case management standards, ASHA's Rule Q and APA's archived guidelines, and it means something slightly different in each. That is the pattern this site keeps finding, and it is worth seeing the other instances together.



Each of those is the same discovery as this one. A word everyone uses, adjudicated by nobody.

Where the published record runs out


Several things in this area could not be established from published sources this week, and it is better to say so than to fill the gaps.


No body in this group publishes a model session note or a required field list for ongoing practice. The BCET case study outline is the closest thing that exists and it is explicitly an application document. If AET publishes practice guidance on documentation in its members' area, it is behind a login and not readable from here.


APA's Record Keeping Guidelines have expired as policy and no replacement has been published. The 2007 document remains the most detailed public specification in the field, and it is being cited in a vacuum. Anyone relying on it should know its status.


Retention periods are not stated anywhere in this post, deliberately. Every code in this group defers the question to statute, the statutes differ by jurisdiction, and APA's own committee described them as vague and substantially variable. A number from the wrong jurisdiction is worse than no number, so the only honest answer is that this is a question for an attorney licensed where you practise.


NASP's Principles for Professional Ethics could not be read. Automated access to that organisation's site has failed repeatedly across several months, so school psychology's own documentation standards are absent from this comparison. They would be worth adding.


Insurance, billing and any district contracting requirements are out of scope here. They are real documentation drivers and they are governed by contract and by law rather than by ethics codes, which puts them outside what this post can responsibly cover.


One last note on sourcing. This post cites seven outside domains, well below the twenty to thirty most posts here carry, and that is a property of the subject rather than a shortfall.


The complete universe of primary sources on this question is five professional bodies' own published documents plus one federally funded technical centre. Padding the list would have meant citing other people's blog posts about these codes instead of the codes, which is not how anything here is written.

Questions practitioners ask


Does any code require me to write a session note after every session?


No. None of the five codes examined here requires a note after a session, names a frequency, or defines what a session note is. AET's code does not use the phrase. The obligations that do exist are to keep records confidential and secure, and to keep whatever records you keep accurate and timely.


What should a session note contain, then?


That is your decision, and the documents give you a sequence rather than a template. APA's archived guidelines are the only published content list, and they ask for the nature, delivery, progress and results of the service. The practical test is whether the note would let a successor practitioner continue the work, let you explain a decision months later, and survive being read by a parent, a school team or a court.


How long do I have to keep client records?


No code in this group answers that. Every one of them defers to statute, and the statutes vary by jurisdiction. APA's own committee surveyed state record-keeping laws and described them as vague and substantially variable. This is a question for an attorney licensed where you practise, not one that professional ethics resolves.


Does AET require me to send families progress reports?


AET II.I.N.1 asks you to establish ways to measure and determine client progress toward goals at regular intervals. It does not name a recipient, a frequency or a format, and no other clause does either. Periodic progress reporting as a defined obligation belongs to the school system's own machinery, not to private practice. In practice your service agreement is what settles it.


Can I use the BCET case study outline as my documentation template?


You can borrow from it, and its de-identification rules are worth adopting verbatim. But it is designed for a retrospective account of a twelve-month case written once for examiners, not for a running record, and it requires formal cognitive and academic testing that many cases will not have. Treat it as a checklist of what a complete picture of a case includes, not as a note format.


Is the time I spend on notes counted as direct service by AET?


No. AET's supervision guidelines explicitly exclude time spent on review of records and time spent on report preparation from countable direct service hours. Only the session itself counts.

One more thing


The absence this post describes is an opportunity as much as a gap. A practitioner whose notes would let a colleague pick up the case tomorrow, whose progress reports state what the numbers can and cannot support, and whose service agreement settles the reporting question before anyone needs it, is doing something the codes never asked for and every one of those four possible readers will notice.


If that is the standard you work to, Illuminate's educator network exists for practitioners like you. Join the educator list to hear about referrals, openings and the work we are doing to build a professional community around this field.

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