Expert therapies integrated into intellectually-stimulating academic programs designed for high cognition learners

Every element of Cajal Academy’s program was designed by our expert, multi-disciplinary team of clinicians. Drawing on decades of experience in public school, home, community, hospital and clinical settings, and Dr. Steven Mattis’ extensive experience in neuropsychological research, our team has reimagined every aspect of education and instruction to align to modern neuroscientific understandings and therapeutic techniques. Together, they are taking down the walls between different “silos” of therapeutic services, through a truly collaborative approach to create programs as integrated as a child’s life-lived experiences. We’ve taken the walls down between different ‘related services’ and brought that expertise into the core of our classroom and social experiences. In the process, we unleashed our experts to redesign every element of curriculum delivery and school design to leverage modern neuroscientific research into the ways that children’s bodies and brains together influence their life-lived experiences, and how these intersections can be used to improve their learning, social and emotional outcomes.In short, we’ve brought what other educational environments consider “related” services into the center of the conversation, leveraging their expertise in how children learn, socialize and develop to optimize our students’ development across all spheres.

The result is a ground-breaking pedagogy that uses children’s need to move as a powerful learning modality, while leveraging movement and games to build the finely-scaffolded neuro-cognitive capacity children need to perform low-lying skills, applying the principle of neuroplasticity.

Here is an overview of our integrated therapies and the team behind them:

Every element of our program is designed to further our students’ therapeutic goals, from fine motor coordination to executive function skills to increasing social cognition, and this includes our fully-integrated academic programming. In fact, the reason we selected collaborative project-based learning as our primary academic framework is because it puts the focus on the executive function and social skills that all kids need, and on which the twice exceptional children at the core of our program often struggle. Therapeutic goals are integrated with academic content and curriculum skills at every stage of our project-based learning, beginning with the selection and design of the projects themselves. Within each project, academic instruction is differentiated for the strengths and weaknesses in each child’s profile. Instruction is delivered through our exclusive, “Body-Informed Learning”: a pedagogy that leverages movement and sensory input to accelerate children’s learning and engagement. Individual lessons are designed or delivered by our occupational and physical therapists to meet OT and PT goals through the movement itself. Academic content is delivered in co-taught classrooms to embed therapeutic goals, allowing our therapists to model strategies within the real-world contexts in which our students need them most, preparing them to bring their best selves “in the moment,” so they can be successful and independent in an increasing range of settings and environments.

At the core of our program is a commitment to empower children by addressing—not just accommodating—the challenges that threaten to hold them back. As parents ourselves, we believe we have a moral imperative to apply all available scientific understandings to remove the obstacles standing in a child’s way, and to empower them to be successful in whatever settings they may choose, from mainstream schools to college to careers. To do this, we create highly-individualized therapeutic interventions based on the data in a child’s neuropsychological and neurophysiological profiles. Throughout each child’s program, we use a 3-step problem-solving approach to identify what specific cognitive, social, emotional and neurophysiological skill(s) are holding a child back; what we can do to build up the neural networks a child needs to perform that skill; and how can we give the child agency over that process. Sensory therapy, support for learning disabilities and social-emotional counseling and coaching are integrated into every aspect of our program, to ensure that our students have the support they need, when and where they need it most.

Decades of research indicate that consequentialist behavioral systems are ineffective for children who have experienced trauma—and can be outright harmful to their mental health and sense of self-worth. This is particularly relevant for the twice exceptional students at our core, whose life-lived experiences with double-atypical profiles put them at heightened risk for the kinds of repeated psychological stress within academic and peer environments that can have a long-term trauma impact. Our team is building on the trauma-informed schools approach by integrating expertise in sensory processing and other types of atypical neurological development, which are also unusually commonplace within the 2e population.

Our highly-expert, multi-disciplinary therapeutic team is the heart of our program. Occupational, physical, music and soon, speech and language therapists closely collaborate under the guidance of Steven Mattis, PhD, ABPP. Dr. Mattis is internationally recognized as a founding father of modern neuropsychology in the United States and a licensed psychologist with decades of experience in clinical, academic and research settings. Passionate about our mission to develop innovations making modern neuroscientific research actionable in the classroom, he provides direct psychological counseling with the kids, valuable insights about the psychological and neurophysiological basis of behaviors observed within the school environment and higher-level consultation on the development of scientifically-grounded interventions. The kids will tell you that he’ll also readily join you in the OT gym or get down on the floor for a game of Connect Four.

Our clinical team directs the design and implementation of each child’s program through a highly-collaborative process, infusing therapeutic strategies throughout all aspects of the program to maximize kids’ academic, social and emotional progress. We pair this with more traditional direct services in one-to-one or small group settings for children who need additional, targeted therapeutic services, ensuring continuity of care for the children in our program while freeing them to “be kids” after school. This also reduces the effective cost of the program for families who may currently be paying substantial amounts out of pocket to secure community-based services.

Meet our Licensed Therapists