The mission of Green River College Occupational Therapy Assistant Program is to graduate entry level occupational therapy assistants who provide occupation-based interventions that maximizes health, wellbeing, and quality of life to diverse populations, all people, and communities utilizing effective solutions that facilitate participation in their daily life. Learn more about the Program Mission and Learning Philosophy.

Prerequisite Classes

You are required to take ONE of the following classes before entering the program (Effective 2024):

  • BIOL& 175, AP 103, BIOL& 241 (Note: Science Course must be 5 credits)

Required Core Classes

Highly recommend completion prior to program entry. Must be completed before the end of the first year in program:

  • English &101 (5 credits), 
  • CMST must be 5 credits
  • MATH  070 or higher (5 credits) 

Curriculum Design

We believe that offering two options of the program will provide students access to a program that can match their learning and lifestyle, thus providing students with the opportunity of education that they might not otherwise be able to participate in because of their life demands. In addition, this facilitates a more diverse cohort.

The Hybrid track is designed for individuals who would like to continue to work to some degree, attend to their family needs and attend courses at night. The Hybrid Track begins in the spring quarter in the odd year and is 9 quarters long. Less face to face to time is spent with the instructor, while in class time is used for a review of the material and application. The course schedule is generally two-three nights a week with some weekends.  Once in the upper 100 and 200 level courses students will need to participate in fieldwork and community service which only occurs during the day and may include weekends. The Hybrid track is yearround.

The Traditional full time program begins each fall and is designed for those who can attend full time and face to face time with the instructor is their best learning style. Courses are scheduled daily during the week with some weekends.  This program track is 7 quarters.  Students in this track participate in fieldwork during the weekday and may include weekends.  See table below to do a side-by-side comparison. 

Hybrid Program

  • Designed for students who need more flexibility in the day hours
  • Courses offered either Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday or Thursday evenings with occasional Saturday intensive labs
  • Courses offered on-line and in face-to-face format
  • Students must be self-directed, computer literate, and have ready access to computer technology to use on-line course delivery method
  • Level I (part-time) fieldwork required involving day-time clinic observations
  • Nine (9) quarters in length; quarters 8 and 9 consisting of full-time day hour internship/fieldwork
  • Full time employment is not recommended
  • Program is developmental in design where students must finish foundational classes in program before entering application academic  practice classes

Traditional Full-Time Day Program

  • Designed for students who are free to attend full-time day classes Monday through Friday
  • For those who desire a structured program in a traditional classroom lecture/lab format
  • Seven (7) quarters in length; quarters 6 and 7 consisting of full-time internship/fieldwork
  • Level I (part-time) fieldwork required involving day-time clinic observations
  • Full time employment is not recommended
  • Program is developmental in design where students must finish foundational classes in program before entering application practice classes

Curriculum Sequence = 90 credits

Hybrid Program

Foundational Classes

Quarter 1 (11 credits) spring:

  • OTA 100 Introduction to Occupational Therapy (3)
  • OTA 102 Applied Anatomy and Kinesiology (3)
  • OTA 103 Applied Anatomy and Kinesiology Lab (2)
  • OTA 111 Fundamentals of OT as Health Care Providers (2)
  • OTA 112 Fundamentals of OT as Health Care Providers Lab (2)

Quarter 2 (9 credits) summer

  • OTA 101 Life Span Growth & Development in Humans (3)
  • OTA 122 Physical Disabilities 1 (3)
  • OTA 123 Physical Disabilities 1 Lab (2)

Quarter 3 (10 credits) fall

  • OTA 120 Developmental Disabilities 1 (3)
  • OTA 121 Developmental Disabilities 1 Lab (2)
  • OTA 131 Physical Disabilities 2 (3)
  • OTA 132 Physical Disabilities 2 Lab (2)

Quarter 4 (11 credits) winter

  • OTA 104 Fundamentals of Gerontology (3)a
  • OTA 126 Clinical Seminar 1 (1)
  • OTA 127 Clinical Seminar 1 Lab (1)
  • OTA 130 Professional Advocacy Experience (1)
  • OTA 133 Psychosocial Dysfunction (3)
  • OTA 134 Psychosocial Dysfunction Lab (1)
  • OTA 128 Application of OTA 1 (1) 
    (note: Requires off campus day time hours, Average of 3 hours, once a week for 10 weeks)

Advanced Practice Classes

Quarter 5 (8 credits) spring

  • OTA 200 Developmental Disabilities 2 (1)
  • OTA 201 Developmental Disabilities 2 Lab (2) (note: Requires off campus day time hours, Average of 12 to 15 hours for one quarter over 5-week period)
  • OTA 202 Ethics, Society and Professional Practice (3)
  • OTA 212 Therapeutic Group Leadership (1)
  • OTA 213 Therapeutic Group Leadership Lab (1)

Quarter 6 (8 credits) summer

  • OTA 210 Therapeutic Practices in OT (3)
  • OTA 211 Therapeutic Practice Clinical Skills Training (2)
  • OTA 220 Therapeutic Group Activities 2 (1)
  • OTA 221 Therapeutic Group Activities Lab 2 (2)  (note: Requires off campus day time hours, Average of 24 hours 3-hour sessions of 8 weeks.)

Quarter 7 (10 credits) fall

  • OTA 222 Clinical Seminar 2 (1)
  • OTA 223 Application of O T Co-op 2 (1)
    (note: Requires off campus day time hours, One-week full time (week determined by OTA program))
  • OTA 224 Therapeutic Adaptations (2)
  • OTA 225 Therapeutic Adaptations Lab (3)
  • OTA 228 Pre-Fieldwork Experience Seminar (2)

Level 2 Fieldwork Classes

Quarter 8 (12 credits) winter

  • OTA 240 Experience Seminar 1 (1)
  • OTA 245 Co-op Fieldwork Experience 1 (11) (note: Requires off campus day time hours, 40 hours of full time of fieldwork experience off campus)

Quarter 9 (12 credits) spring

  • OTA 241 Fieldwork Experience Seminar 2 (1)
  • OTA 246 Co-op Fieldwork Experience 2 (11) (note: Requires off campus day time hours, 40 hours of full time of fieldwork experience off campus)

Traditional Full-Time Day Program

Foundational Classes

First Quarter (15 credits) fall

  • OTA 100 Introduction to Occupational Therapy (3)
  • OTA 101 Life Span Growth & Development in Humans (3)
  • OTA 102 Applied Anatomy and Kinesiology (3)
  • OTA 103 Applied Anatomy and Kinesiology Lab (2)
  • OTA 111 Fundamentals of OT as Health Care Providers (2)
  • OTA 112 Fundamentals of OT as Health Care Providers Lab (2)

Second Quarter (13 credits) winter

  • OTA 104 Fundamentals of Gerontology (3)
  • OTA 120 Developmental Disabilities 1 (3)
  • OTA 121 Developmental Disabilities 1 Lab (2)
  • OTA 122 Physical Disabilities 1 (3)
  • OTA 123 Physical Disabilities 1 Lab (2)

Third Quarter (13 credits) spring

  • OTA 126 Clinical Seminar 1 (1)
  • OTA 127 Clinical Seminar 1 Lab (1)
  • OTA 128 Application of OTA 1 (1)
    (note: Requires off campus day time hours, Average of 3 hours, once a week for 10 weeks)
  • OTA 130 Professional Advocacy Experience (1)
  • OTA 131 Physical Disabilities 2 (3)
  • OTA 132 Physical Disabilities 2 Lab (2)
  • OTA 133 Psychosocial Dysfunction (3)
  • OTA 134 Psychosocial Dysfunction Lab (1)

Advanced Practice Classes

Fourth Quarter (13 credits) fall

  • OTA 200 Developmental Disabilities 2 (1)
  • OTA 201 Developmental Disabilities 2 Lab (2) (note: Requires off campus day time hours, Average of 12 to 15 hours for one quarter over 5-week period)
  • OTA 202 Ethics, Society and Professional Practice (3)
  • OTA 210 Therapeutic Practices in OT (3)
  • OTA 211 Therapeutic Practice Clinical Skills Training (2)
  • OTA 212 Therapeutic Group Leadership (1)
  • OTA 213 Therapeutic Group Leadership Lab (1)

Fifth Quarter (12 credits) winter

  • OTA 222 Clinical Seminar 2 (1)
  • OTA 223 Application of O T Co-op 2 (1)
    (note: Requires off campus day time hours, One-week full time (week determined by OTA program))
  • OTA 220 Therapeutic Group Activities 2 (1)
  • OTA 221 Therapeutic Group Activities Lab 2 (2) (note: Requires off campus day time hours, Average of 24 hours 3-hour sessions of 8 weeks.)
  • OTA 224 Therapeutic Adaptations (2)
  • OTA 225 Therapeutic Adaptations Lab (3)
  • OTA 228 Pre-Fieldwork Experience Seminar (2)

Level 2 Fieldwork Classes

Sixth Quarter (12 credits) spring

  • OTA 240 Experience Seminar 1 (1)
  • OTA 245 Co-op Fieldwork Experience 1 (11) (note: Requires off campus day time hours, 40 hours of full time of fieldwork experience off campus)

Seventh Quarter (12 credits) summer

  • OTA 241 Fieldwork Experience Seminar 2 (1)
  • OTA 246 Co-op Fieldwork Experience 2 (11) (note: Requires off campus day time hours, 40 hours of full time of fieldwork experience off campus)

Program Mission

The mission of Green River College Occupational Therapy Assistant Program is to graduate entry level occupational therapy assistants who provide occupation-based interventions that maximizes health, wellbeing, and quality of life to diverse populations, all people, and communities utilizing effective solutions that facilitate participation in their daily life. The program partnering Green River Colleges and its resources provides each student with a comprehensive education of knowledge, skills, values, and professional behaviors necessary to provide these interventions and to provide the students with support services and resources that will facilitate their success in learning. 

Consistent with Green River's priorities, we will work towards meeting our mission statement using the core values and philosophy which include:

  1. Student Success to support student engagement, retention completion and success through excellent teaching and learning and comprehensive support services such as using on campus resources such as the Writing Center, specific designated Occupational Therapy Assistant program tutors, counseling services, encourage utilization of office hours and peer mentorship.
  2. High Quality: Provide high quality in teaching, learning, support service in an environment of compassion and integrity. Utilizing course evaluation, peer review, employee feedback and attending the multiple courses that the college provides allows instructors course to develop to meet student needs and community practice.
  3. Student Access: meet student needs for access to and inclusion in their educational pursuits. The program does this by participating in Accessibility courses and using captioning services.
  4. Community Engagement: collaborate, stimulate, and contribute to the educational, economic, and social development of our external and internal communities through continued learning. The Student Occupational Therapy Association has been involved in Kid's Day at the YMCA, participated in sponsoring volunteering for the Washington State Occupational Therapy Association (WOTA) conference.  Both students and faculty have presented at the WOTA conference.
  5. Equity - encourage, foster respect for and respond equitably to diverse perspectives and needs. Students received instruction in multiple courses about the importance for Occupational Therapy practitioner to provide service to a diverse population.
  6. Global awareness -foster citizen responsibility by cultivating a global perspective on critical issues and challenges affecting our community and the world. The program contributes to this by integrating current global issues into our problem-based approach.
  7. Stewardship - strive to maintain sound fiscal management, increase effective and efficient operations, develop state-of-the-art infrastructure (to include staffing, technology, and facilities), and be forthcoming and transparent in accountability for resource use. The program director, with input from faculty, makes every attempt to ensure items are functional and monies are available within the OTA budget that equipment items can be replaced.
  8. Innovation - seek to encourage, create, and adopt innovative perspectives, policies and practices that will help achieve the College's mission. The program makes every attempt to be innovative and current.
  9. Campus environment - preserve the safety, ecology, and sustainability of our campus environment.

The program is guided by the philosophy that the profession of Occupational Therapy is inclusive, maximizes health, well-being and quality of life for all people, populations, and communities through meaningful participation in everyday living. The program believes that human being grows on many levels.

Occupational Therapy practice places value and emphasis on the “occupational nature of humans and importance of occupational identify (Unruh,2004) in relationship to healthful, productive and satisfying living.” The core of the philosophy is that humans, regardless of age and ability, need and require occupation in order to develop, grow, and flourish; by pursuing occupation, humans are able to holistically express the essence of their human nature. (Hooper & Wood, 2019)

Five common threads have been identified as essential skills that will contribute to each student's success while in program, fieldwork, and the workforce. In each course, the student will find that faculty incorporates the identified common threads.  Each instructor is responsible for weaving the identified common threads into their curriculum and providing feedback during the Student Advising Period.  The five common threads include:

  1. Communication: We emphasize the need for skillful communication, which is essential for optimal clinical care. The ability to effectively exchange information is one of the most essential elements of a treatment team from both an intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective; it is also one of the most difficult to teach. By incorporating a strong emphasis on producing skillful communicators, our program aims to develop our students as efficient, cost-effective, and client-centered practitioners.
  2. Professional Behaviors: The concept of professionalism and its' encompassed behaviors in the clinical setting is essential to creating an environment of trust between employers, employees, clients, and caregivers. Professional behaviors can include a wide array of attitudes and conduct such as professional presentation, punctuality, dependability, empathy, and professional reasoning. Taking context into consideration, the GRC OTA Program seeks to foster the ability to define and implement these behaviors.
  3. Lifelong Learning: It is the goal of our program to develop future OT practitioners that are lifelong learners to provide optimal client care and have optimal employment opportunities in the future. For these reasons, we foster the value of lifelong learning through the ongoing pursuit of knowledge for personal and professional development. Occupational therapy is not a static profession but one that is dynamic and led by research influencing evidence-based practice. Occupational therapy practitioners must keep current with this dynamic nature by being in tune with current research and adapting to the changing healthcare environment. This is accomplished by developing new skills and obtaining new knowledge through utilization of available educational resources. Our students are evaluated in coursework from a standards-based perspective, set the standard for learning high and rewarding behaviors that exhibit digging deeper and going further to promote habits of lifelong learning.
  4. Problem Based Learning: In the Green River College (GRC) Occupational Therapy Assistant (OTA) Program instruction is presented through problem-based learning. Problem-based learning is an active approach to learning, which is focused around a clinical or scientific problem. Using this method, students are presented with various real world or simulated clinical scenarios. These case studies enable the students to assess their areas of knowledge and growth to enhance professional reasoning skills in order to develop clinical competence in preparation for application in the fieldwork setting.This style of learning increases and facilitates problem solving, self-initiation, and clinical reasoning skills which are central to the occupational therapy process. Not only are these skills essential to the student in the classroom, they are also essential toward professional development in the context of lifelong learning related to client-centered care.
  5. Occupational Performance: Occupations are any of the things that we do in everyday life that we consider to be meaningful and necessary. In occupational therapy, the activities are broken down into subcategories including; activities of daily living, instrumental activities of daily living, education, work, play, leisure, and social participation. Throughout the program, students are encouraged to not only assess client's ability to perform successfully in these areas, but also their own occupational performance. By examining the balance between all areas of occupation students gain an understanding of how an upset in the balance can affect an individual physically, mentally, and emotionally. This understanding assists students in recognizing the need for a holistic, client centered approach to therapy and identify intervention consistent with models of occupational performance.

In addition to faculty including these common threads into their courses, faculty contributes to the student quarterly assessment designed around each of these five core threads, which is administered by their assigned program advisor. Students are also expected to complete a self-assessment of their performance in each of these five areas and, while meeting with their advisor, review the ratings for each objective.  The student, in collaboration with advisor, writes measurable goals to address the areas of growth for each thread.  Each advising session builds upon the previous assessment.

These threads prepare our students to meet the following GRC OTA Learning Outcomes as we strive to ensure the established accreditation standards are taught, integrated, and measured:

  1. Demonstrate mastery of the occupational therapy foundational content requirements.
  2. Discuss the basic tenets of occupational therapy.
  3. Conduct and document a screening and evaluation process.
  4. Intervene and implement occupational therapy processes.
  5. Describe the context of occupational therapy services.
  6. Assist in the management of occupational therapy services.
  7. Read and use professional literature in the field of occupational therapy.
  8. Discuss the importance of ethics, values, and responsibilities in the field of occupational therapy.

In addition to the above outcomes and the learning outcomes and competencies identified in each course, courses are expected to include methods to assess and challenge students in the following campus-wide learning outcomes.

  1. Written communication skills: Written Communication encompasses all the abilities necessary for effective expression of thoughts, feelings, and ideas in written form.
  2. Critical thinking: Critical thinking finds expression in all disciplines and Everyday life. It is characterized by an ability to reflect upon thinking patterns, including the role of emotions on thoughts, and to rigorously assess the quality of thought through its work Critical thinkers routinely evaluate thinking processes and alter them, as necessary, to facilitate an improvement in their thinking and potentially foster certain dispositions or intellectual traits over time.
  3. Responsibility: Responsibility encompasses those behaviors and dispositions necessary for students to be effective members of a community. This outcome is designed to help students recognize the value of a commitment to those responsibilities which will enable them to work successfully individually and with others.
  4. Quantitative and Symbolic Reasoning: Quantitative Reasoning encompasses abilities necessary for a student to become literate in today's technological world. Quantitative reasoning begins with basic skills and extends to problem solving.

Learning Philosophy

The OTA program proudly describes its' program as a Developmental Model for student's integration and application of learning. We believe that students will learn basic foundational concepts during their lower 100 courses and slowly be introduced to application of the material in upper 100 and lower level 200 courses. In upper 200 level courses students are demonstrating their integration of knowledge.  In these upper 200 level courses students are expected to demonstrate application of academic content from the 100-level course where students are required to integrate information previously learned, demonstrate their lifelong learning by research outside of the class, and demonstrate their skills in the community through lab and Level 1 fieldwork experiences.  This developmental model provides for the opportunity to introduce each accreditation standard twice in the program, once at the 100 level and once at the 200 level thereby ensuring that the curriculum is designed to set the foundation for success on Level 2 fieldwork, the NBCOT exam and entry-level employment.

We believe that it is essential that students understand that they must rely on previously learned content and build their knowledge to improve clinical competency. We strive to teach students to access & utilize all available resources and seek out updated evidenced-based information to instill the importance of life-long learning skills which are essential as they move toward becoming an entry level clinician in a field that is dynamic, progressive, and growing in its' theoretical and practical roots across a multitude of populations. We rely on the knowledge students gain in both the prerequisite and co-requisite coursework. The listing of the OTA program prerequisites and co-requisites are listed below.   Students are required to complete the Prerequisites prior to or during the application process (see list below). In addition, once in the program, students are required to complete co-requisites that we feel enhance the student's skills as an occupational therapy assistant and assist in meeting campus wide learning outcomes. The program is rigorous, and we recommend that co-requisites be completed prior to the third quarter.