Cajal Academy’s ground-breaking approach doesn’t accommodate children’s disabilities—it removes the skill deficit that drives them.

Over the past five years, Cajal Academy has developed a first-of-its-kind approach to reducing and in some cases eliminating learning disabilities, by using task-driven interventions to build up the neural network the child needs to perform the many discrete skills that they need to perform those learning activities.

This ground-breaking approach, developed at Cajal, builds on the well-established scientific principle that the human brain is constantly rewiring itself as we learn: a principle called “neuroplasticity.” In other words, whether at school or in the course of our everyday activities, our brain isn’t just acquiring new knowledge and information within the confines of its current infrastructure. Rather, it is constantly reallocating resources within that infrastructure to remove resources (neurons) from the networks we need to perform tasks that we are no longer doing, and to add resources to the networks required for the tasks that we use frequently.

This has huge implications for general education, and even bigger ones for special education. For starters, it means that each child’s skills are not static—and thus that learning “disabilities” are not immutable. Rather, they can be developed through an intentioned approach to (1) identifying which specific neurocognitive “splinter” skills are holding the child back and then (2) building up the neural networks required to perform those skills by being strategic about the tasks we ask that child to do.

Equally important though, this means that when we instead accommodate a child’s “disability” through supports that remove the demand to use that skill, we may actually make the problem worse—because as we reduce the demand for that skill, the brain will reallocate those neurons to other neural networks.

Getting behind the diagnostic labels to figure out what’s driving them: a data-driven process

This work is inherently detail-driven. Traditional special education approaches start from diagnoses like “ADHD,” “dyslexia,” “dyscalculia,” “ASD,” etc. These labels are given based on checklists of symptoms in the DSM or diagnostic statistical manual: checklists that were derived through a statistical analysis of what different psychologists are referring to when they use a particular diagnosis label. But this doesn’t tell us what’s driving that presentation. Thus, it only tells us how to accommodate the problem—not how to solve it.

At Cajal, we take a very different approach. We start with the actual performance on learning and social-emotional tasks, and then we dig into the data in the child’s neuropsychological and neurophysio assessments to identify in which of the several discrete neurocognitive skills required to perform those tasks does this child lag behind. Using well-normed assessments and our team’s high level of expertise in understanding what combinations of skills you need to perform a given task, we identify which cross-cutting skills are holding back their performance across a range of academic and social skills and then fashion a carefully scaffolded series of tasks requiring the brain to engage in that particular thought process—so the brain applies more neurons to the neural network required to perform it.

In this way, we are rewiring the child’s brain to apply more resources to those skills they need most to progress. Over time, the struggles in the classroom, and the diagnostic labels that described them, are removed, preparing the child to go forward with a broader array of settings and tasks in which they can be successful.

Transformative results in children’s learning—and in their lives

In the five years since we launched our school, we have successfully applied this process to a range of challenges, from reading and writing disabilities to organizational, social-emotional and math difficulties.

The brilliant middle school student who could not independently read more than a paragraph without losing track of what the words even mean, or write more than his own name without someone spelling it for him letter by letter in September—and was independently reading 45 to 60 pages a week in February and independently writing a short story while he typed it in April.

The second grader who was several grade levels behind in reading who was described as lacking in “motivation” but who was reading several grade levels ahead just six weeks later—after we discovered that his visual processing challenges were interfering with his ability to retain and recall what words look like: an essential skill for reading.

The hyperlexical nine year old who spoke with the vocabulary of a college professor but curled up in fetal position under his desk when we asked him to write because when he tried to write his brain went blank, who came to see himself as an author after we identified that his difficulties with motor coordination were taking all the neurocognitive resources he needed to perform the skill.

The middle school student who was unable to do basic addition and subtraction but who could draw and make music at an elite level (and thus clearly “understood” math) who broke through once we identified his brain was not retaining sequences, without which one cannot add—or properly parse social feedback, comply with oral directions or many of the other areas where this child struggled.

The profoundly gifted high school student who eschewed movies as “boring” and never felt he fit in or knew how to connect with others, but who started to understand and respond to nonverbal communications after we identified that he wasn’t picking up the salience of visual content and provided a bespoke curriculum (using TV sitcoms as our course material) to academically backfill his knowledge base of how changes in facial expressions correlate to different human emotions.

As these students have made these breakthroughs, we have seen our children transformed not just in their scholarship but in their understandings of themselves. We couple our interventions with growth mindset coaching, to help them find the courage to try the tasks they had previously found difficult and thus to discover what they can now do.

Only at Cajal.

We are unaware of any other school that is approaching special education interventions in this way. And yet, this science is not new. Each of these skills can be identified and indeed quantified through well-established and normed tests administered by neuropsychologists, reading specialists and other therapeutic experts. Thus, we have data that we can use to identify both their relative and absolute strengths and weaknesses, and thus what skill could, if improved, make the biggest difference for the child. Occupational therapists have well-established protocols for everything from handwriting to gross motor coordination that apply neuroplasticity to improve the child’s ability to perform these motor-related skills. We are bringing these two well-established disciplines together in a new way to reduce the gaps in a child’s neurocognitive skills.

Contact us to find out whether your child might benefit from this process and approach, and whether Cajal Academy might be the right fit for their needs.

Here is a window into how this process works:

The first step is to figure out what problem this child needs our help to solve. We do this at a very granular level. Throughout a child’s program, our multi-disciplinary team works with the data across different aspects of a child’s profile, “on the ground” observations and ongoing formal and informal assessments to identify those cross-cutting neurocognitive and neurophysiological skills that are most affecting a child’s life-lived experiences. We call those skills the “Domino Ones” because like the first domino in a maze, these skills can drive challenges that the child is experiencing across a range of academic and social-emotional spheres. You can learn more about ho we identify and prioritize those skills here.

Once we have identified a child’s current “Domino One” cross-cutting skills, we design a highly-personalized program to systematically build up the neural network that a child needs to perform that skill, applying the principal of neuroplasticity. We do this using the toolbox of movement, games and other strategies that have been developed in occupational therapy settings for decades to improve a child’s sensory integration, handwriting and more—except that in this case, our targeted skill is a neurocognitive one. These skills may range from orthographic processing to organizing information and more.

We approach this through a systematic and carefully-scaffolded approach. Starting with the child’s areas of strength, we gradually increase the type and complexity of task demands to strategically build out new neural connections. With intentioned and repeated use, these pathways gradually strengthen until the child’s neural network for that skill becomes stronger and more efficient. In this way, our program moves beyond accommodating children’s disabilities to actually addressing them, sustainably removing the barriers that stand in their way.

Changing the growth curve, and its end point

We will use reading as an example to demonstrate the power of this approach. We can see at a glance that a child struggles to read for more than a few minutes—but the key question is “why.” These include phonological processing (processing and remembering what words sound like), orthographic processing (processing and remembering what words look like), visual tracking (smoothly running your eyes to the end of the line and then returning one line down), postural control (to hold ourselves, and our book, upright) and more. Each of these skills must be performed simultaneously in order to pick up the meaning or even enjoyment from reading at a given literature level—so if even one of these skills significantly lags behind the others than the entire reading ability will be held back. Bringing up the child’s capacity to perform that one skill then unlocks their native abilities in other areas, and their reading level increases to one that is more inline with their strongest of the skills needed to engage in reading—even though the focus was on training the brain to do that one process rather than on practicing reading as a whole.

The result is a completely different growth curve, in which the child’s progress with respect to the integrated task of “reading” may appear flat for a long period of time—but then suddenly shoots up in a “hockey stick” curve to the level defined by their neurocognitive strengths instead of being held back by their weaknesses. This takes patience, and an investment in the process. Educators and parents alike are accustomed to seeing constant incremental growth in the integrated skill (in this example, reading)—but we see that exponential growth that more than makes up that ‘lost’ time can be achieved if we instead take the time to identify and address the splinter skill deficit holding up that growth.

Navigating prior academic trauma as the process proceeds

Many child who have experienced a learning disability or delay accrue a level of trauma, due to the repeated experiences of failure as they are asked to perform that skill, especially if this has been in front of their peers. We understand this trauma as a learning “disability” in and of itself, as it triggers neurophysiological responses that push blood flow away from the parts of the brain that are essential to the learning experience.

For the child in whom this survivalist response has already been triggered, we have to avoid further re-entrenching their view that they can’t perform a given skill if they are going to be able to access and execute their skills as they develop. Thus, while we work to build up the individual skills, it is important (albeit counter-intuitive) to not require them to engage in the integrated, academic tasks we want them to improve. This allows them to experience the sudden shock of being able to do what was so difficult before, thus allowing them to experience and absorb their new abilities into a more positive identity as a learner in a way that is much more difficult to achieve when we experience constant but gradual growth.

To do this, we take it as the educator’s responsibility to design each task in the way that this child is best able to learn as of this stage in their development with respect to each component part of the overall task, rather than expect that the child will mold themselves to the way the class is taught. You can learn more about how we differentiate instruction for specific neurocognitive skills here.

This process is integrated into our classroom instruction as well, with our physio and psychological therapists co-teaching or consulting on the design of our Body-Informed Learning to further progress this neuroplasticity work, along with social-emotional, OT and PT goals.

As with all components of the Cajal Academy program, the third step in this process is to give agency over this work over to the children themselves.

This starts with sharing the science behind the process with the children themselves. When we teach kids how to understand the tasks they do everyday as a composite of individual tasks, and how to understand their own unique mix of strengths and weaknesses, we give them a lens that they can use to predict which tasks will be disappointingly “easy” and which will be impossibly hard. And when we teach them to science of neuroplasticity and explain how each of the tasks we ask them to do contributes towards that effort, we give them a rational reason to believe that things will in fact begin to improve—thus providing an authentic foundation for a growth mindset. It also models a process the students can use in college and beyond to be more conscious of their own learning profiles and feel empowered to improve their own performance by applying the same approaches that we model in our program.

Perhaps most important of all, when we share the science also of neuroplasticity with these highly-analytical kids, we help them to understand that we all have areas where we struggle and others where we shine—and that that’s “just science.” This provides a powerful counter-narrative to messages they may have absorbed on the playground that they are are “bad” or “stupid.” That is an essential step towards reducing the hold that prior academic trauma or anxiety has on so many twice exceptional kids and other complex learners, thereby setting them on the road to independently chart their own course for the future.

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