Bringing education into the 21st century with a new, “Neuroplasticity School” model

Cajal Academy is the first in a new model for schools that applies modern neuroscience to make special education interventions more effective, while decreasing their costs and fostering a new approach to mainstreaming that meets the needs of more of the kids in the room

Cajal Academy is bringing specialized instruction into the 21st century, through a new educational model that capitalizes on the promise of new neuroscientific research that points the way to not just meet children’s unique profiles but grow them.

We’re calling this new model a Neuroplasticity School, because it is built on the well-established scientific principle of “neuroplasticity:” the reality that the human brain constantly rewires itself to increase the neural networks required to do the things we most frequently ask it to do. Of course, this principle is at play in every school and in every task we do throughout our everyday lives. What makes Cajal Academy (and the future generation of schools we hope to inspire) different is that every aspect of our program is designed to drive this process, improving the neurocognitive infrastructure the student brings to learning and social-emotional experiences. We systematically re-examined all aspects of academic, social-emotional and physical education from the ground up through the lens of this sea change in scientific thought. Our Student Growth Catalysts employ a new, systematic and data-driven approach to identifying what granular level, “splinter skills” are impairing a child’s academic or life-lived experience, and then for building up those skills through a mix of traditional and novel therapeutic interventions. These are paired with instruction in the science of neuroplasticity and growth mindset coaching, to help the student develop a sense of agency over their experience and a toolbox for responding to future challenges.

The result is a comprehensive new model, in which the role of K-12 education isn’t just to teach students how to read, write and be kind to one another, but to optimize the neurocognitive and neurophysio infrastructure that determines their ability to learn and apply those skills, and that informs a student’s academic and life-lived experiences. This gives students with typical learning profiles a greater understanding of their strengths and challenges. For children with IEPs, our approach has proven successful in not just improving students’ access to the general education curriculum but in removing the disabilities that impaired that access in the first place.

Drawing on the specialized instructional models that have come before

This new, “Neuroplasticity School” model builds on specialized instructional models that came before us and takes them to the next level. Across academic and coaching areas, we follow “gifted” schools’ methodologies in that we present standards-based academic work through the lens of analytical reasoning: our students’ shared strength.

Meanwhile, in keeping with special education schools, we provide highly individualized programs of specialized instruction, based on the data in a child’s profile. However, special education programs are typically based on the assumption that a child’s differences or “disabilities” are immutable, and thus the goal is to fill the gap between their abilities and the average student’s access to the general education curriculum—thus reducing the impact of that disability on the child’s ability to access that curriculum. This is accomplished through a series of accommodations and specialized instruction teaching to the way the child currently learns.

Taking Special Education into the 21st Century

At Cajal Academy, we approach this work in a fundamentally different way, through the lens of neuroplasticity. In keeping with the science, students’ learning and social-emotional differences are understood not as “disabilities” but as “Not Yet Skills,” meaning that they have not yet been fully developed. Consistent with the mandate of special education more generally, we provide differentiation and accommodation to reduce these skills deficits’ impairment on the child’s ability to access curriculum, “teaching to the way the child learns.”

But we go further. Each student who is not yet able to access their gifts upon joining Cajal Academy receives a highly-individualized, Student Growth Catalyst. Each Catalyst follows specialized diagnostic and multi-disciplinary treatment approaches developed at Cajal by which we identify where in the neurodevelopmental chain a link was missed or insufficiently developed, thus driving the downstream learning impairments. We then target the neural network that the child requires to build up that and higher order neurocognitive “splinter” skills, thus increasing the ways the child is able to learn in the future. Thus, each Catalyst is like the Individualized Education Plans (“IEP’s”) developed in public school settings in that it incorporates a mixture of services by licensed therapists, accommodations, and academic differentiation, but it is unlike an IEP in that it also provides a roadmap for how to reduce or even remove those challenges, through a mix of traditional and Cajal-exclusive approaches, applying the well-established principle of neuroplasticity.

The result is that the number and intensity of difficulties requiring accommodation reduces over time, while the child’s “toolbox” for self-monitoring, self-managing and self-advocating for their needs increases. The range of settings and pursuits in which the child can be successful increases accordingly.

This work is intensively data driven, and draws on our clinical and research team’s deep expertise in how different combinations of granular level “splinter skills” are required to perform a given learning, social, emotional or physical task. For students with neuropsychiatric diagnoses such as ADHD and ASD, or for specific learning disabilities such as dysgraphia, dyslexia and dyscalculia, we dig beneath the diagnostic labels to identify the specific neurogenic cause driving the presentation that meets those diagnostic criteria. This reveals new ways to understand and improve the child’s academic and social-emotional functioning. For instance, if a child is struggling to read we don’t just ask them to do more of it. Instead, we break down the reading task into the myriad cognitive and physical tasks you must perform simultaneously in order to read; identify which of those skills are acting as an anchor holding the others back, and then systematically increase the network of neurons that the brain uses to perform that skill, through neuroplasticity. This changes the student’s academic growth curve, but results in an ultimate performance level that is define by their highest skills rather than by their weakest ones.

Transformative results for children’s learning, and lives

In the five years since we launched Cajal Academy as a pilot program, our school has brought transformative results for kids having a diverse array of learning, social-emotional, neurophysio and chronic medical challenges, often in less than a single school year.

An elementary school student made up a gap of several grade levels in reading within six weeks, when we identified that weakness in his orthographic processing (remembering what words look like: one of the many skills required for reading) was the ‘anchor’ holding back his ability to read and used our Neuroplasticity Interventions to teach his brain to capture, categorize and recall visual information.

A brilliant middle schooler came to us unable to read more than a paragraph without losing track of what the words even mean, or write more than his own name without someone spelling each word letter by letter. By October we had identified severe dyspraxia at the root of it all. By February he was independently reading 45-60 pages a week, and by April he was independently writing a story while typing it.

Several gifted students who successfully hid their challenges with written expression and motor coordination through classroom avoidance and/or school refusal for a year or more in other settings have evolved within our program to full attendance and participation in just a matter of months—and began investing themselves in the strategies required to solve the underlying learning problems that triggered it all.

Along the way, the array of “behaviors” through which these kids sought to conceal their struggles shifted as well—not through reward charts, applied behavioral analysis (we are not an ABA program and do not use these techniques in our school) but by identifying and solving the deficient neurocognitive and neurophysio problems that had led them to develop those coping mechanisms in the first place.

Preparing innovative thinkers for a future defined by their strengths

The transformations we have seen for our students through our Catalyst Method fundamentally change the future prospects for our students, from what’s left after you carve out their areas of limitations, to one defined by their strengths. These skills exceed state curriculum standards to provide the super-sized executive function, social leadership and self-care skills that innovative thinkers need to turn those visions into thought leadership. This is an essential life skill for people having this profile, because without the skills to realize those unique ways of seeing the world, those visions can become torments, as the high rates of anxiety, depression, social isolation and suicidal ideation in this population of adults indicates. Thus, we identified that for our cohort of twice exceptional students, we need to go beyond state curriculum standards and develop the skills that students will need to realize their unique visions in that future: skills that are difficult to develop in college if you don’t have them upon arrival.

To that end, all aspects of our “general education” curriculum are informed by our Vision to Voice Curriculum developing the skills and perspectives that inherently innovative thinkers need to realize their visions. This toolbox was developed by our co-founder: a former high-powered litigator turned social entrepreneur who is mom to two twice exceptional kids, based on the life lessons she absorbed being raised within from a twice exceptional family of origin. These skills include:

• the global perspectives and real world understandings required to develop your vision of the change you’d like to make in the world;

• the critical thinking skills required to develop original insights into those issues;

• the executive function skills required to turn those insights into action;

• the communication and collaboration skills required to lead others to join your mission, giving voice to your vision;

• the understandings of yourself that are required to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for your needs; and

• the growth mindset required to take on challenges you know may be hard—or perhaps have never even been done before.

All students at Cajal, including those who either entered Cajal already prepared to access their gifts or who no longer require them in view of the progress they made through their Student Growth Catalyst, learn this skills-based curriculum. This is infused throughout our project-based learning, social leadership and Agency and Growth Mindset curricula, bringing the “special” and “general” education components of our program together while creating a cohesive cohort and shared sense of purpose.

A new approach to “mainstreaming” educational environments

This mainstreaming approach, lost in therapeutic outplacement environments, benefits all of our students. For those who are not yet able to access their gifts, it further accelerates their progress by providing increasing models for the sense of agency, social skills and growth mindset they are working to develop. For our gifted students who have already progressed to where that work is not required, it provides real life skills in how to understand and support the neurodivergent peers who will be their peers and colleagues in the college and professional environments that are likely to be intellectually-satisfying for them.

We are excited about the potential that this skills-based approach to “re-wiring” students’ learning infrastructure from the bottom up within the context of an infrastructure that provides further development for the strengths of even our most profoundly-gifted students offers as a new model for developing school communities as well. It represents a shift from defining specialized school settings based on disabilities (a system that is only feasible if we understand those disabilities to be static) to one in which all students are understood to be on a fluid journey towards the future that they have the potential to lead—and in which we all benefit through an increased and more scientific understanding of one another’s challenges and abilities.

Pointing the way to relieving public school districts’ fiscal crises

Across the country, towns and municipalities have long struggled to meet their obligations under federal education law to provide a free and appropriate education (“FAPE”) for all students living within their districts. All families with children who have special needs feel, and worry, about the uncertainty and all-too-often the social isolation that this causes. For families with twice exceptional children, this uncertainty can take on new dimensions, as they struggle to balance their children’s challenges today against the profound potential they see for tomorrow—if only they can help them to get from here to there. All too often this leads to discord and a “zero sum game” between the district and the parents, where collaboration is what’s required.

Our work suggests that this new, “Neuroplasticity School” model for implementing the demands of the IDEA can shift this equation and provide a very different financial and educational “return on the investment.” The changes are most dramatic for students having profiles that are the most challenging to serve within other educational settings, such as students with multiple overlapping learning and/or social-emotional challenges. Identifying the splinter skill deficits driving those challenges and building up the neural networks required to perform them is an inherently labor-intensive therapeutic process, which must be paired with growth mindset and agency coaching to help the student believe in (and therefore apply) their newly emerging skills. Thus, there is an initial up-front investment that can be significant—but inline with the cost of “therapeutic” programs that address the behavioral manifestations of those challenges without addressing the root causes.

However, under our Neuroplasticity Model the cost of serving the student declines over time as the child’s primary skill deficits are improved, and efforts shift to filling curriculum that was lost as a result of the earlier skill deficit. We pass those savings on to our families and sending districts, tailoring tuitions to the stage in the Student Growth Catalyst where their journey at Cajal begins and then decreasing their tuitions over time as their abilities increase, until the Catalyst (and its associated accommodations and services) are removed altogether. At that point they are invited to reenroll at our base tuition level, which is lower than the cost of many local mainstream private schools, in order to increase the number of families who are able to access our program and to make it more feasible for school districts that lack robust programming for their gifted students to consider long term outplacements to our specialized environment. To illustrate, 90% of the families reenrolling at Cajal Academy for a second school year have done so at a significantly lower tuition rate than that required for their first year in the program.

Taken on a broader scale, this could have significant implications for public school funding of special education needs. When we approach the mandate of special education as being to fill the gap between their “disability” and the abilities of their average mainstream peers, it should be expected that special education costs will continue to rise as our bright and gifted students run out of the runway they rely upon to scaffold their ability to overcome inefficiencies in their learning infrastructure with the ever-increasing complexity of curriculum, executive function demands and social interactions increases with their evolution into middle and high school. When we instead shift the focus of special education to using neuroplasticity to actually reducing that gap by identifying and then enhancing those splinter neurocognitive skills that derail a given learning or social process, we fundamentally change the runway for that child, and the financial cost of supporting them over the lifetime of their K-12 education.

Moreover, all of our innovations are delivered by licensed therapists who are already present in public schools across the country, and utilize strategies that those therapists already know how to do—we’re just using them in new ways. Likewise, we start with the data in the well-normed assessments that public schools are already collecting—we just look at that data in a new way that allows us to get behind the diagnostic labels that describe what a problem looks like to identify the neurocognitive or neurophysio skill that’s driving that presentation so we can actually solve it.

Find out more about how we can support public school districts in our Resource Center for School Districts and Professionals.

Revolutionizing education beyond Cajal Academy

From the start, we have been determined not only to develop these new ways of doing things, but to disseminate them, so that we can empower kids well beyond our small school setting. We are a non-profit organization with a highly expert and visionary team. In June, 2024 we reached an important milestone in identifying the essential metrics and approaches for replicating the transformational changes we have seen across a range of bright and gifted student profiles. That led us to shift our focus to putting in place the new facility, information systems and clinical infrastructure required to scale this approach. We are actively working to develop partnerships, grants and new models for public-private partnership so that we can bring the benefits of this work to a much broader group of kids, far beyond our walls.

We began our work with students having very high intellectual abilities paired with an area of special education need, because these children’s needs are so challenging to meet within mainstream educational environments, and there is a nationwide dearth of special education schools tailored to their needs. The result is that these students are disproportionately in 1:1 homebound or homeschooling programs, with high long term incidents of social isolation, anxiety, depression and even suicidal ideation. Currently, our efforts are focused on refining and documenting our model within this cohort of kids, however as that work progresses and our resources increase, we will design studies to test the effectiveness of our methodologies with kids having a broader array of intellectual profiles. We have also begun working with public school districts to develop new models for private-public partnership that can better support the needs of these complex, vulnerable students through parent education and workshops for school district personnel sharing how the neuroscience behind our approach can be used to improve student performance, decrease behaviors and increase teacher agency. Long term, we look forward to developing information systems that could be licensed by public school districts and other educational settings to extend the benefits of our innovations to a broader set of students far beyond our walls.

How you can support our work

Cajal Academy is entirely tuition-funded, placing a huge burden on the families that we serve to work with their school districts to reimburse their educational programs. Your donations will help us to develop a scholarship fund to help make our program financial accessible to a broader array of students.

We are also looking for volunteers to help support our work. We are currently seeking potential candidates to expand our Board of Directors, and are looking for volunteers to help us identify and pursue grant opportunities that can help to support our research and development efforts. Contact us to find out about these and other opportunities to support our work.