Taught by someone who's been that kid.

No one needs more to-do lists. We just need someone to sit beside us and confidently and consistently remind us that we are good enough and capable enough to do hard things.

Erin Carroll is an educational therapist, clinical reading specialist, executive function coach, and a dedicated advocate for children who learn differently. For more than fifteen years she has helped students, along with the adults who love and teach them, understand how their minds actually work.

Her work rests on a few unshakable beliefs. Every child is good, wants to do good, and longs to be seen as good. Every child is capable of learning, growing, and moving through what is hard. Every child needs at least one adult who sees them as smart, funny, interesting, and capable, someone who is, as Erin puts it, on their team. So much of what she does is helping a child who walked in believing they are broken walk out understanding that their brain simply works differently, and that different is not less.

Out of years in specialized schools, Erin developed Responsive Integrated Teaching™, the model at the heart of her practice. Where traditional tutoring isolates skills and works from a deficit lens, Responsive Integrated Teaching does the opposite. It weaves literacy, executive function, growth mindset, and social-emotional learning into one whole-child approach, and it insists that a child's strengths and emotional safety come first, before deep skill learning can happen, not after. She believes just as firmly that the caregivers and teachers around a child are partners in the work, never bystanders.

Erin earned her Master's as a reading specialist at Columbia University's Teachers College, where she received the James L. Neff Reading Specialist Fellowship and the Charlotte M. Hamill Scholarship. She is a Wilson Reading System certified practitioner and an International Dyslexia Association Dyslexia Practitioner, and she co-authored three decodable chapter books for a research-based early reading program.

Erin's approach is grounded in lived experience as much as in training. Having moved through school with a brain that works differently, she understands what her students face, and she draws on that understanding in everything she builds. That deepened after college, when a year in South America, including months helping build a women's literacy project in Sucre, Bolivia, taught her that literacy is freedom, and that not knowing what you are doing is not the same as not being capable. As a queer educator and mother, she brings a deep, personal understanding to what it means to feel like you do not quite fit, and to the work of helping children feel that they do.

Beyond her private practice, Erin founded and hosts grrit.ykids, a nonprofit read-aloud podcast made with children's authors and dedicated to kids who learn, think, feel, or look a little differently. She also leads rit. rhymers, an early-literacy playgroup for toddlers and preschoolers, because the foundation for reading is built long before kindergarten. Her practice is intentionally small, so that the children and families she works with receive the depth of attention the work deserves.

The practice is not only for kids. Erin coaches adults too, offering parenting support for caregivers and executive function and performance coaching for grown-ups building their own systems. Underneath all of it is one belief: we are each on some version of a journey toward radical self-acceptance, and every child deserves a guide who is fully on their team.