Educational Therapy Supervision Requirements: Six Bodies, Six Answers
You have a folder of hours. Session logs, a spreadsheet, maybe a signed letter or two from a site administrator. What you do not have is a way of knowing which of those hours will count, because the answer depends entirely on which organisation you are counting them for.
That is the practical problem with educational therapy supervision requirements, and it is worse than it looks. Six bodies that credential the people doing this work all publish an hour figure. Not one of those figures measures the same thing as any other.
Some count the time you spent teaching. One counts the time you spent being watched. One counts months rather than hours. One counts lessons. One publishes no hour total at all and never has.
So before you can ask whether your hours transfer, you have to ask what each body is actually counting. This is a map of that, built from what each organisation publishes on its own pages, checked on 16 September 2026.
"Supervised hours" almost never means hours of supervision. In five of the six systems below, it means hours you spent teaching while somebody else was formally responsible for you.
That distinction is not pedantry. It is the difference between a requirement you can satisfy with a full caseload and one you can only satisfy by paying for a supervisor's time.
The phrase does not mean what it says
Read the requirement pages carefully and a pattern emerges. Almost every body separates two quantities that practitioners routinely blur together.
The first is practicum volume — how much teaching you did under an arrangement in which someone was accountable for your work. This is the big number, the one in the hundreds.
The second is observation count — how many times a qualified person actually sat in, watched a complete lesson, and wrote something down. This is the small number, usually between three and ten.
The big number is what gets called "supervised hours." The small number is the only part of it where supervision demonstrably happened. And the ratio between them varies wildly: the Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators asks for ten observations across a hundred practicum hours at one level, while the Association of Educational Therapists asks for no observations at all and instead fixes consultation time as a proportion of service time.
If you have been assuming that an hour logged for one body is an hour logged for another, the rest of this article is going to be uncomfortable reading.
But it is the same finding this site has now hit six times in a row — in qualification levels on test publishers' storefronts, in continuing education units, in the "Orton-Gillingham based" label — and the lesson is the same every time. When several organisations share a vocabulary, check whether they share a meaning.
Six bodies, six units of account
Here is the shape of it before the detail.
AET counts direct service hours, and sets supervision as a ratio against them. Consultation time is derived, not fixed.
ALTA counts clinical teaching practicum hours plus a separate count of demonstrations, under a named category of supervisor.
The Orton-Gillingham Academy counts supervised practicum hours that compound across levels, plus observations of complete lessons by a Fellow.
CERI counts weeks and sessions. It publishes no practicum hour total.
Wilson counts lessons and observations, and at the higher level publishes neither.
NILD counts months of coaching, and separately counts student contact hours that are not supervised at all.
Six systems, six units: hours, hours-plus-demonstrations, compounding hours, sessions, lessons, months. Any attempt to convert between them is your own arithmetic, not theirs.
AET: a ratio, not a total
The Association of Educational Therapists is the body most educational therapists in the United States are credentialing through, and it is the odd one out here in a specific and interesting way. It is the only one of the six whose published figure describes contact with a supervisor rather than time spent teaching.
The academic gate sits one rung lower, at Associate ET, and AET states that newly approved Associates "may immediately begin meeting the Direct Service Hour and Supervision requirements" for the next level. The headline requirement for Educational Therapist/Professional status is blunt: "Document and verify 1,500 Direct Service Hours completed within the past 10 years" and "Complete formal Supervision with a BCET." Two separate obligations, and the second is sized against the first.
What counts as a direct service hour
AET publishes a list, and the exclusions are more useful than the inclusions. Direct service is "the time spent with an individual student or client."
The qualifying activities are individual sessions of remediation or teaching, individual sessions of assessment, classroom observations on a client's behalf, parent conferences and IEP attendance on a client's behalf, consultations with allied professionals, fieldwork or practicum hours from a higher education or credential programme, and — notably — "Direct service completed as part of supervision."
Then come the two parentheticals that quietly remove a large fraction of most practitioners' working week. Individual sessions of remediation or teaching count, "(Note: this does NOT include time spent on preparation or review of records.)" Individual sessions of assessment count, "(Note: this does NOT include time spent on report preparation.)"
Write a two-hour report after a ninety-minute assessment and you have logged ninety minutes. That is a defensible rule and AET states it plainly, but it is not how most people keep a timesheet, and it is worth discovering before you submit rather than after.
The hours are evidenced the old-fashioned way: "Submit signed letters of verification from work site administrators, supervisors, and professional colleagues." There is no portal, no audit trail, no third-party verification service. A person who watched you work signs something.
The 1:10 ratio, and what the page does not say
Supervision itself is assigned rather than fixed. AET's own FAQ says the number of consultation sessions "will depend on the 1:10 ratio of hours assigned," and that the assignment is made by the Supervision Subcommittee after it reviews your background and your accumulated hours.
This is worth stating carefully, because the ratio is quoted second-hand far more often than it is read. The sentence on AET's page gives a ratio and does not, in that sentence, define what sits on either side of it.
Treat it as a ratio the Supervision Chair applies to hours they assign you, and ask the Supervision Subcommittee what your own number is rather than computing one from a blog post. The page is also explicit that "The frequency of consultations and duration of the supervision process will be agreed upon by the parties involved."
Two further procedural facts on that page will cost you real time if you miss them.
First, the sequence is strict: "Supervision begun before official notification does not count toward the Educational Therapist/Professional (ET/P) upgrade." You cannot start early and backfill.
Second, you need a live caseload. "You must have at least one client in a private caseload to gain from the supervisor experience," though AET is clear you may hold a full-time salaried post and see individual students after school.
You choose your own supervisor from among Board Certified Educational Therapists, and you pay them. The fee is "mutually decided upon as part of the supervision agreement." If no BCET practises near you, the membership committee will help you make contact with a long-distance supervisor, but AET says explicitly that following through is your responsibility.
AET states the purpose of all this in a sentence that is more candid than most credentialing prose: the goal is "for you to have an experienced and trusted advisor to provide guidance and feedback on the treatment alliance within the educational therapy clinical model." Not fidelity to a method. The alliance.
The second thousand hours
Board certification adds another block. The BCET page requires you to "Complete and document an additional 1,000 hours of clinical practice" and to "Submit a formal case study that is approved by the Certification Board."
AET puts a realistic timescale on that second block, which almost no other body does. To be eligible to submit the case study, an ET/P "must be in practice long enough to accumulate an additional 1000 hours of direct service, usually three to five years, which must be documented."
Those hours sit "beyond the 1500 hours required to qualify for ET/P membership," and must span at least one year of membership at the ET/P level.
Three to five years is the only honest duration estimate any of these six bodies publishes. Everyone else gives you a number and leaves the calendar to you.
The case study itself is an analytic discussion of a real case "conducted by the candidate with an individual client over a period of at least one to two years," submitted without identifying material about either the client or the candidate, and read by "a team of five trained and experienced readers," each scoring against a specified rubric.
A failed case study is rewritten and goes to a different team, who treat it as new. A written ethics examination follows.
And at the top of the ladder the obligation reverses. AET's own description of what BCETs do includes supervision: they "supervise educational therapy students who are completing their internships in certificate programs and provide supervision and mentorship to Associate ETs pursuing ET/P membership." The supply of supervisors is generated by the credential itself, which is the whole reason the 1:10 arrangement can work at all.
The full ladder, with the academic prerequisites at each rung, is mapped in our guide to how to become an educational therapist.
ALTA: hours plus demonstrations, and a login in the way
The Academic Language Therapy Association runs the credential most often abbreviated CALT, and its requirements are a clean example of the two-quantity structure: a large practicum figure and a small demonstration count, both under a named category of supervisor.
CALP, the practitioner level
The CALP application page requires a bachelor's degree, a "minimum of 45 instructional hours," a "minimum of 60 clinical teaching practicum hours," and a "minimum of 5 demonstrations." Training must take place under the supervision of an Instructor of Certified Academic Language Practitioners or a Qualified Instructor.
The examination window is defined at both ends: it is available "with a minimum of nine (9) months and a maximum of two (2) years from the beginning of CALP Training."
CALT, the therapist level
The CALT application page raises every figure and adds a degree bar. "A master's degree is required for a Certified Academic Language Therapist." The training is a "minimum of 200 instructional hours" and a "minimum of 700 clinical/teaching practicum hours, with a minimum of 3 teaching situations in both intro and advanced levels." Demonstrations rise to a "minimum of 10." Supervision is by a Certified Academic Language Therapist-Qualified Instructor.
The examination window runs from "a minimum of two (2) years (21-24 months) and a maximum of five (5) years" from the start of training.
That clause about teaching situations is easy to skim past and it is a real constraint. Seven hundred hours delivered to one student across two years does not satisfy it. The requirement has a breadth condition inside the volume condition.
What could not be read, and why that matters
ALTA's public site is a JavaScript application that serves no readable content to an automated client, and its binding requirement pages sit on a members portal. The figures above were retrieved from the application pages; ALTA's supervisor-qualification requirements, its rules on what happens to hours accrued under a supervisor who loses their standing, and its carry-forward provisions are not publicly readable and are not stated here.
If any of those points is load-bearing for your own timeline, load the members pages yourself or email ALTA and get the answer in writing. This site has an outstanding note to do exactly that on a separate ALTA question, and it remains outstanding, which is itself a reasonable argument for not treating any second-hand summary of ALTA's rules — including this one — as authoritative.
One further caution carried over from our survey of learning specialist credentials: ALTA's public FAQ and its binding application pages do not agree about whether an IMSLEC-accredited training programme is required. The application pages require an MSLE programme under a Qualified Instructor and do not mention IMSLEC. Ask ALTA in writing rather than relying on either page.
The Orton-Gillingham Academy: hours that compound
The Academy — which now brands itself the Orton-Gillingham Academy while retaining the legal name Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators — publishes the most transparent hour structure of the six, and the only one where the totals explicitly accumulate rather than reset.
Classroom Educator
The Classroom Educator level requires a "Bachelor's degree from an accredited institution in any area of study," coursework of "30 hours (minimum) by a Fellow or by a Fellow-in-Training (FIT)," and "50 hours supervised practicum over 8 consecutive months, minimum."
Observation is specified in unusual detail: "5 observations of the trainee teaching complete lessons in a group (of at least 2 students) or classroom setting conducted by the Fellow (3 out of the 5 observations may be by a Fellow-in-Training (FIT) or Clinical Supervisor (CS))."
Note what that does. It names who may observe, and it caps how much of the observing may be delegated. Two of the five must be the Fellow. The Academy also states what the level is for: the holder "is qualified to apply the principles of the Orton-Gillingham Approach to modify and provide literacy instruction for the classroom or small groups (Tier 1)."
Associate
The Associate level requires the same degree, coursework of "Option A: 60 hours (minimum) or Option B: 70 hours, by a Fellow or by a Fellow-in-Training (FIT)," and "100 hours supervised practicum over 8 consecutive months (minimum)."
Observations double and lengthen: "10 entire 40-60 minute lesson observations of the trainee conducted by a Fellow (7 out 10 observations may be by a FIT or Clincial Supervisor (CS))." The typographical slips are in the source. The delegation cap moves with the count — three of ten must be the Fellow.
Certified
The Certified level is where the compounding becomes explicit. Coursework is "100 hours minimum (in addition to 60 hours at Associate for a total of 160 hours)." Practicum is "200 hours supervised practicum over 2 academic years, minimum (in addition to the 100 hours at Associate for a total of 300 hours)."
Observations stay at ten, but the setting broadens: "10 entire 40-60 minute lesson observations of the trainee by a Fellow on-site, unedited video or web-based application." The word "unedited" is doing work there.
Fellow, where the observed activity is supervision itself
The Fellow level requires "300 hours of supervised practicum over 3 academic years, minimum (in addition to 300 hours at Certified for a total of 600 hours over 6 years, minimum)."
And then the observation requirement changes character entirely. At Fellow level it is "10 observations of the FIT by a Fellow in a variety of settings, for example: teaching courses, supervising trainees, conducting observations, and giving feedback to trainees."
That is the most interesting single line in this whole survey. At every other level and in every other body, what gets observed is your teaching. At the top of the Academy's ladder, what gets observed is your supervising. Supervision is treated as a distinct skill with its own practicum — an idea none of the other five bodies expresses in its published requirements.
One boundary worth stating: the Academy publishes a degree prerequisite for the Classroom Educator and Associate levels only, and does not state coursework hours for Fellow. Do not infer either.
CERI: weeks and sessions, and no hour total at all
The Center for Effective Reading Instruction, affiliated with the International Dyslexia Association, is the clearest demonstration that "hours" is a convention rather than a necessity. CERI's practicum requirements are fully specified and contain no hour figure anywhere.
The Interventionist practicum
For the Structured Literacy/Dyslexia Interventionist, the training requirement is a "Minimum 90 Training Hours" — 45 on the IDA Knowledge and Practice Standards, 45 on assessment, progress monitoring, lesson planning and delivery for decoding-strand skills. But the practicum is counted differently.
It is "1 Student," across "Two Academic Semesters each: 12 Consecutive Weeks (TOTAL of at least 24 weeks)" and "24 Sessions (TOTAL of at least 48 sessions)," delivered "2x/week for 60 minutes non-consecutive days or 3x/week for 45 minutes," with "3 Formal Lesson Observations/Conferences with Write-Up."
The supervisor is "Appointed by IDA Accredited Partner, Approved by CERI" — a two-step arrangement in which the training provider nominates and the certifying body ratifies.
That phrase carries weight, because the International Dyslexia Association's programme accreditation is a separate process with its own two tiers, and CERI's practicum can only be supervised inside a programme that has passed it. CERI also requires a passing score on the KPEERI exam, the knowledge test built on IDA's Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading.
You can multiply 48 sessions by the published session lengths and arrive at a number. CERI does not, and neither should you in an application. The requirement is sessions and weeks. The continuity condition — twelve consecutive weeks, twice — is a constraint that an hour total would not capture at all, which is presumably the point.
The Specialist practicum, per student
The Structured Literacy/Dyslexia Specialist adds a third 45-hour training block, bringing it to a "Minimum 135 Training Hours," and expands the practicum to "3 Heterogeneous Students." The session requirement is then stated per student: "12 Consecutive Weeks (TOTAL of at least 24 weeks per student)" and "24 Sessions (TOTAL of at least 48 sessions per student)."
Two provisions on that page are genuinely useful and rarely mentioned. A candidate may complete the practicum "through a single IDA Accredited Partner; or through a combination of up to three IDA Accredited Partners (one per assigned student)" — the only explicit portability clause in this survey.
And "CERI certified Structured Literacy/Dyslexia Interventionists will receive credit for one student; individuals not holding a CERI certification will need to engage three students." Prior CERI certification reduces the requirement. Prior certification from anyone else does not.
Note also the scope limit CERI places on its entry-level certificate. The Structured Literacy Classroom Teacher certificate has no practicum at all — its 45 hours sit under a "Program of Study Recommendation" rather than a requirement — and CERI states plainly that holders "do not provide specialized, remedial reading interventions to students."
The alternate route, and what it tells you
CERI publishes something no other body here does: a route for people whose practice is real but whose paperwork is not. The alternate route to Specialist is aimed at candidates who "have been practicing as a tutor for students with dyslexia for more than 10 years, with local, state, or national recognition, but have no formal documentation of having completed a supervised practicum experience."
What replaces the practicum is documentation, not hours. Three case studies covering three students with heterogeneous needs, where "Each of these students must have been seen for at least 48 individual tutoring sessions (approximately 45 to 60 minutes per session) over 24 consecutive weeks, for a total of 144 tutoring sessions across all three students."
Plus two letters of support from professional colleagues, which "should not be authored by another candidate who is currently also applying for CERI certification," and a letter from a parent or from the student.
The window is narrow: "Alternate Route applications are only accepted between July 1st and September 30th of each year." And the rejection language is unusually direct — applications whose case studies do not meet the requirements "will be automatically rejected without further review," with one re-submission permitted per review period.
If you are a mid-career practitioner with a decade of undocumented work, this is the only published door in the set that is built for you. It opens for three months a year.
Wilson: lessons and observations, not hours
Wilson Language Training counts neither hours nor sessions. It counts lessons, and it is the only body here that publishes detailed selection criteria for the student you practise on.
Level I
WRS Level I Certification requires you to conduct one-to-one instruction "with a practicum student for a minimum of 65 lessons with a lesson plan written for each lesson," and to "Be observed five times teaching the practicum student. Each observation is scheduled with the W.C.T. and lasts approximately 60–75 minutes." The observer is a Wilson Credentialed Trainer.
Around that sit requirements no other body states. Pre- and post-testing must use "two norm-referenced tests, one being the Word Identification and Spelling Test (WIST)," and testing used to select the student "must be no more than six months old."
The practicum student must be approved by Wilson before instruction begins, and must meet all of the following:
"In or entering grades 4–12 (grade 3 approved if student has been retained)."
"Overall cognitive ability in average range (minimum IQ = 80)."
Reading "in the 5th to 30th percentile with a minimum total reading score of grade 2.0."
Listening comprehension higher than independent reading comprehension, and poor decoding and spelling skills.
"The practicum student must not have received any previous Wilson instruction."
There is a scheduling condition too: the student "must be available to be scheduled for a minimum of three to four 45-minute lessons or two to three 60–90 minute lessons per week (one-on-one)." For a private practice seeing clients once a week, that alone can be the binding constraint — a point we take up at length in the section on what this means for a caseload.
And a small, very practical one: "Participants will need access to an external camera to be used during observation. The camera must be external to your device, as built-in cameras do not capture the observation completely."
The whole thing is time-boxed. "Individuals have 12 months from the date of enrollment to complete the online course and practicum."
Level II, and what the page publishes now
WRS Level II Certification is structured as "four components required to achieve WRS Level II Certification," organised into two courses of study — small-group implementation, and advanced word study covering Steps 7 to 12. Each course of study "may take up to 15 months to complete and may be taken consecutively or concurrently."
Here is the finding, stated as an absence rather than a change: as of 16 September 2026, the Level II page publishes no lesson count, no observation count and no degree prerequisite. It names four components and a fifteen-month window per course of study, and that is all.
Figures for Level II practicum volume circulate in secondary writing, including in an earlier article on this site; they are not on Wilson's current page and are not repeated here.
Level II yields the Wilson Dyslexia Therapist credential, and the page adds that it "does not qualify one as a Wilson Credentialed Trainer (W.C.T.)" — the trainer credential comes from a separate internship. Which is to say: at Wilson too, the right to supervise is a distinct credential, not a by-product of seniority.
There is an interesting corroboration here. Wilson's certifications overview states that the International Dyslexia Association recognises both Level I and Level II as Accreditation Plus programmes, a designation earned after review for alignment with the Knowledge and Practice Standards and "confirmation of an intensive and supervised practicum." So a Level II practicum has been confirmed to exist by a third party. Its dimensions are simply not on the page.
Note also that Wilson's URLs for both certification pages have moved from the professional-learning path to a certifications path. Old links redirect, but if you have bookmarked requirement pages, re-check them.
NILD: months of coaching, and contact hours that are not supervised
NILD counts two things, and neither is a supervised hour.
The first is a period of coaching. On successful completion of the Level I course you become an Intern Educational Therapist and "will engage in nine months of job-embedded coaching. There will be monthly coaching sessions at which your attendance is required." The Level II page states it as "9 monthly Job-Embedded Coaching (JEC) sessions, via Zoom." Nine meetings. No hour figure attaches to them on either page.
The second is volume of practice, and NILD is explicit that it is unsupervised in structure: you "will be permitted to work with students and will need to complete 100 student contact hours prior to moving on to Level II."
The FAQ defines it without ambiguity — "You must spend at least 100 hours providing NILD therapy with students. You can attain this with one therapy student or with multiple students." The Level III course requires another 100 on the same terms.
The only observed artefact in the published sequence is a video. Level II prerequisites include a "5 Core Demo – video submitted and reviewed." One recording, reviewed once.
Courses themselves run as "four weeks of asynchronous, online work followed by 5 days of residency either in person or virtual." A bachelor's degree is preferred in education or a related field, and there is a pre-assignment to observe a live or recorded NILD session before starting.
NILD also offers a Professional Certified Educational Therapist credential, and its FAQ states that annual licence renewal "applies to Standard Licensure (for intern and full educational therapists) AND PCETs."
One framing point that this site has made before and will keep making, because the language invites a misreading. NILD describes itself as "a professional training and licensing organization," and its Level I page is headed with language about getting licensed to practise NILD Educational Therapy.
Enforcement is stated plainly: "if you do not hold a current license, you are not permitted to practice NILD Educational Therapy or use NILD materials." That is a private organisation's method licence with an annual renewal, not a government licence, and NILD nowhere claims otherwise. The conflation risk belongs to the reader.
IMSLEC: the only published trade between observation and hours
IMSLEC does not certify individuals and says so: "While IMSLEC does not certify individuals, many of IMSLEC's accredited members offer certification." What it does is accredit training courses — "IMSLEC accredits training courses. Our online directory lists the accredited courses that offer Multisensory Structured Language Education (MSLE) training."
That makes its accreditation level standards a useful reference point, because they set the floor that an accredited course's own practicum must meet. And they contain something no other document in this survey does.
At Teaching level, the standards are a bachelor's in education or related, 45 course contact hours, 60 practicum hours, 5 direct observations, over a nine-month period.
At Instructor of Teaching level, "90 clock hours beyond Teaching level. Total of 135 hours" of coursework and 600 practicum hours across an entire cycle of teacher training.
At Therapy level, a master's in education or related, "200 total" course contact hours, a 24-month minimum period — and then the interesting part. Practicum hours are published as "700 — 500 — 350" against direct observations of "10 — 15 — 20."
Read those two rows together. More observation buys fewer practicum hours. Twenty observed lessons discharges the requirement at 350 practicum hours; ten observed lessons requires 700.
IMSLEC is the only body in this survey that publishes an explicit exchange rate between supervision intensity and practice volume, and in doing so it concedes the thing the other five leave implicit — that the hours and the observations are measuring different things, and that the observations are the ones carrying the quality signal.
Twenty observed lessons discharges the requirement at 350 practicum hours. Ten observed lessons requires 700. Somebody sat down and priced supervision against practice, and then published the exchange rate.
At Instructor of Therapy level the figure is "2100 (including therapy level)" practicum hours, over three years as a certified MSLE therapist plus a two-year internship in an MSLE programme.
And there is a footnote under every one of those tables that quietly changes the arithmetic for anyone working in groups: "Group instruction counts as one session." Teach four students together for an hour and you have logged one hour, not four.
When several organisations share a vocabulary
This is the seventh time this pattern has surfaced on this site, and the prior instances are worth reading together, because each one is the same failure of translation in a different domain.
Qualification levels on test publishers' storefronts: the same instrument carries different letters at different stores.
Continuing education: a CEU means ten contact hours to one body and one clock hour to another.
The "Orton-Gillingham based" label: no organisation adjudicates the claim at all.
Reading intervention programs: the things being compared are not the same kind of object.
Learning specialist certification: the credential everyone refers to does not exist.
Executive function coach training: no certifier claims accreditation from a body it did not create.
The role map that anchors all of them: the three job titles overlap in practice and diverge in governance.
Supervised hours is the same shape, applied to the one quantity practitioners most often assume is standard.
The coaching bodies count something else again
If your practice sits at the executive-function end of the field, a different set of bodies applies, and they count neither practicum hours nor observations. They count client hours and mentoring hours — a third unit again.
ICF
The International Coaching Federation requires, for its Associate Certified Coach credential, 60-plus hours of coach-specific education, 100-plus hours of client coaching experience, and 10 hours of mentor coaching. For the Professional Certified Coach credential: 125-plus education hours and 500-plus client hours. For Master Certified Coach: 200-plus education hours and 2,500-plus client hours. Mentor coaching stays at 10 hours at every level.
That is a structure worth noticing. The mentored component is a flat constant while the practice requirement multiplies twenty-five-fold. ICF's Level 1 accreditation standard for training providers adds the observation piece: "Observation and written feedback of five coaching sessions" and "10 hours of mentor coaching over a minimum period of three months." A Level 2 tier sits above it, and the credentials overview sets out how the three individual credentials relate.
PAAC
The Professional Association of ADHD Coaches counts coaching hours with a condition nobody else imposes: "A CACP credential must have 60 ADHD Coaching hours, 90% of which must be paid. A PCAC credential must have 250 ADHD Coaching hours, 90% of which must be paid."
Paid hours. Pro bono work, practice sessions with peers and coaching done inside a salaried role are capped at a tenth of the total. It is the only requirement in this entire survey that distinguishes hours by whether a client paid for them, and the reasoning is not hard to reconstruct — a paying client is evidence of a market that a training cohort is not.
PAAC's three credentialing paths each carry their own observation count: five session observations on the school path, ten on the cohort path, five on the portfolio path. Sponsors "will nominate a candidate for a credential level, after listening to 2-3 sessions."
And its standards page states the principle underneath every observation requirement in this article better than any of the education bodies manage:
"If it cannot be observed, it cannot be assessed. If it cannot be assessed, it cannot be certified."
PAAC also does something structurally unusual that is worth flagging while we are on the subject of who supervises whom. It does not train.
Its FAQ answers the question directly — it credentials people who are already practising coaches — and it recognises two accredited schools, ADDCA and MentorCoach, with the footnote that "PAAC has no financial affiliation with these schools." That is the only published statement of financial independence between a certifier and a trainer anywhere in this survey, and in a field where the certifier is usually the vendor, it deserves to be noticed.
BCC
The Center for Credentialing and Education's Board Certified Coach scales its training requirement against your existing accountability. Its eligibility policy sets four routes.
A relevant master's plus an active state licence or national certification needs "at least thirty (30) clock hours of CCE-approved coaching training." The same master's without licensure needs sixty. A bachelor's plus an ICF credential needs sixty. Everyone else needs "at least one hundred and twenty (120) clock hours." Every route then requires "at least thirty (30) hours of post-degree coaching services."
Thirty hours of practice. Against AET's fifteen hundred. The two numbers are not comparable, because they are not measuring the same activity — but a practitioner holding both credentials is running two clocks in two units, and neither body acknowledges the other.
The credentials that require no supervised hours at all
The honest counterpoint to everything above is that a substantial number of credentials in this field ask for no supervised practice whatsoever. If you are weighing options, this is the axis that separates them most sharply, and it is rarely the axis the marketing leads with.
The National Board for Executive Function Coaching awards its Board Certified Executive Function Coach credential "through 85 hours of executive functioning training and an independently proctored board examination." There is no practicum, no observation and no supervisor in that sentence.
The organisation is explicit about what carries the assurance instead: "Verification by an outside proctor is what separates a board credential from a certificate of attendance."
That is a coherent position, and an examination is a real test of knowledge. But it is a different kind of evidence from a Fellow watching you teach ten complete lessons. It tells you what a candidate knows, not what they do in a room with a struggling reader.
NASET's Board Certificate in Special Education is built the same way: "58 targeted units across 7 comprehensive modules" awarding "114 study hour credits," assessed by end-of-module questions. No practicum, no supervised hours, no portfolio.
University certificate programmes sit in a third position again. CSUN's Advanced Study in Educational Therapy awards a certificate and separately lets graduates meet the academic course requirements for AET Associate membership — the coursework and the credential are deliberately decoupled.
The policy page for UCSC Extension's educational therapy certificate puts the whole landscape in one sentence: "The certification by the AET is optional for practice in the field. There is currently no state licensure for educational therapy."
None of which makes an examination-based credential worthless. It makes it a different instrument. The question to hold onto is the one PAAC states plainly: what, on this credential, has actually been observed? If the answer is nothing, the credential is evidence of knowledge and of having paid attention in a course. That is worth something. It is not evidence of practice.
And it is worth noticing which way the two ends of the field are moving. IMSLEC's directory of accredited courses, the Academy's Fellow track and AET's case-study route all push the evidence toward observed conduct over long periods.
The newer coaching credentials push it toward proctored examinations. Neither is obviously right, but a practitioner choosing between them should know they are buying different things — a point we develop at length on what an executive function coaching credential actually establishes.
What this means for a real caseload
The gap between these requirements and an actual private practice is where most of the pain lives, and it is worth naming directly.
A once-weekly private caseload cannot satisfy Wilson's Level I practicum on schedule. Wilson asks for three to four 45-minute lessons or two to three longer lessons per week with a single student, and gives you twelve months. CERI asks for two or three sessions a week across twelve consecutive weeks, twice over. Those are school-employment dosages, not private-practice dosages — the same structural mismatch we found across published intervention programmes generally.
AET's 1,500 hours is the opposite problem. It is achievable on a weekly caseload, but only over years, and the exclusions matter: preparation, record review and report writing are all outside the count.
Six questions worth asking before you count anything
Which unit does this body count? Hours, sessions, lessons, weeks or months. Write it down in their words.
Does it count my teaching or their watching? Both numbers usually exist. Find both.
Who is permitted to supervise, and how much can they delegate? The Academy publishes a delegation cap. Most do not.
Is there a continuity condition? Twelve consecutive weeks is not the same as twenty-four sessions whenever you can fit them.
What is excluded? AET excludes preparation and report writing. IMSLEC counts group instruction as one session.
Is there a window? ALTA opens its examination between nine months and two years. CERI's alternate route opens for three months a year. Wilson gives you twelve months from enrolment.
Answer those six for the body you are actually credentialing through, before you accumulate anything on the assumption it will transfer. Because none of these bodies publishes a reciprocity arrangement with any other. Not one.
There is no external authority to appeal to either. The bodies that accredit certification programmes against published standards — the National Commission for Certifying Agencies, which accredits programmes assessing professional competency, and ANAB, which accredits personnel certification bodies against ISO/IEC 17024 — are not named anywhere on the requirement pages surveyed for this article.
And the federal occupational classification offers nothing either: the alternate job-title index maps job titles to occupations, which is a labour-market classification exercise and not a register of who may practise or of what training anyone has completed.
What your ethics code requires that no hour total covers
There is a quieter obligation running underneath all of this, and it does not care what any of these bodies count.
AET's Code of Ethics, Revision #9, 2025, requires members at I.I.B to "provide professional services only within the boundaries of their competence based on their education, training, supervised and professional experience while operating within the scope of practice and ethics of the Association of Educational Therapy" — supervised experience named as one of four grounds of competence, alongside education, training and professional experience.
Clause I.II.A narrows it further: members "provide only those professional services for which they have been adequately trained." And I.I.A requires members to "accurately represent in an ethical and legal manner their competence, education, training, and experience."
Read together, those three clauses say something the hour tables do not. Completing a practicum is evidence of competence in the thing you practised. It is not a general licence, and it does not travel to an adjacent method, an adjacent population or an adjacent age band.
A Wilson Level I practicum run with a student in the fifth to thirtieth reading percentile, in grades four to twelve, with an IQ at or above eighty, is evidence about that population. The AET Fact Sheet sets the scope boundaries around all of it.
Nothing here is legal advice. There is no state licensure for educational therapy, and questions about what any law requires of you in your own state belong with your state agency and, for independent practice, with an attorney.
Where the published record runs out
Being straight about the gaps is more useful than filling them.
ALTA's binding requirements sit behind a members portal and its public site serves no readable content to an automated client. The CALP and CALT figures above come from the application pages. ALTA's supervisor-qualification numbers are not published on its qualification requirements page and are not stated here.
Wilson publishes no practicum volume for Level II as of 16 September 2026 — no lesson count, no observation count, no degree prerequisite. Figures circulating in secondary sources, including an earlier article on this site, are not on the current page.
CERI publishes no practicum hour total at any level, only weeks, session counts and session lengths. Any hour figure attributed to CERI is somebody's multiplication.
NILD publishes no clock-hour figure for its courses or its coaching, only nine monthly sessions and 100 student contact hours per level.
The Academy does not state coursework hours for the Fellow level, and states a degree prerequisite only for Classroom Educator and Associate.
AET's 1:10 ratio sentence does not, in that sentence, define both sides of the ratio. The assignment is made by the Supervision Subcommittee case by case.
No body in this survey publishes a reciprocity arrangement with any other. That is a finding about what is published, not a claim that no informal accommodation has ever been made. If you need hours recognised across bodies, ask both in writing, and get the answer in writing.
Frequently asked questions
Do supervised hours transfer between credentialing bodies?
Nothing published by any of the six bodies surveyed here says they do. Each specifies its own unit, its own supervisor category, its own observation count and its own continuity conditions.
CERI has the closest thing to a portability clause, and it is internal: a CERI-certified Interventionist receives credit for one of the three students required at Specialist level, and a candidate may spread the practicum across up to three IDA Accredited Partners. Prior certification from any other organisation earns no such credit.
Does supervision mean someone watches me teach?
Usually not, or at least not often. In most of these systems the large "supervised" figure counts hours you spent teaching while somebody was formally accountable for you, and a separate, much smaller figure counts complete lessons actually observed — five at ALTA's practitioner level, ten at the Academy's Associate and Certified levels, five at Wilson Level I, three at CERI.
AET is the exception: it does not specify lesson observations and instead assigns consultation time as a ratio against service hours.
Can I count preparation, report writing or parent communication?
It depends entirely on the body and you should not assume. AET is the only one of the six that publishes an explicit exclusion list, and it excludes preparation, record review and report preparation from direct service hours, while including classroom observations, IEP attendance and allied-professional consultations undertaken on a client's behalf. IMSLEC's standards add that group instruction counts as a single session regardless of group size.
How long does AET supervision actually take?
AET does not publish a duration. Its page says the frequency of consultations and the duration of the process are agreed between the parties, that the number of consultation sessions depends on the ratio of hours assigned, and that the Supervision Subcommittee assigns those hours after reviewing your background and accumulated direct service.
For the subsequent board certification step it does give a realistic figure: accumulating the additional 1,000 hours usually takes three to five years.
Do I need a supervisor before I start accruing hours?
For AET's ET/P upgrade, yes, and the sequencing is strict. Supervision begun before official notification of your assigned hours does not count toward the upgrade. Direct service hours themselves may be accrued beforehand and include fieldwork or practicum hours from a higher education or credential programme. Elsewhere the practicum is normally embedded in an accredited course from the outset, so the question does not arise in the same form.
What if I have years of practice but no documented practicum?
CERI publishes the only route in this survey built for that situation. Its alternate route to Structured Literacy/Dyslexia Specialist is aimed at practitioners with more than ten years of tutoring students with dyslexia and no formal documentation of a supervised practicum, and substitutes three case studies covering 144 tutoring sessions across three students, plus letters of support.
Applications are accepted only between 1 July and 30 September each year, and case studies that do not meet the specification are rejected without further review.
Before you start counting
If you are early in this and the ladder itself is the confusing part, start with how to become an educational therapist and the scope map of what the work actually consists of. If you are further along and building a practice around it, the private practice guide covers the operational side.
And if you would rather hear about this kind of thing as it is published — including the corrections, of which there are always some — join the Illuminate educator list. It goes to practitioners, it is about practice rather than parenting, and it is where this work lands first.
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