Introducing the world’s first “Neuroplasticity School”

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. We developed 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 our academic work through the lens of analytical reasoning, thus increasing students’ abilities to perform the skills at the heart of 21st century progress and success.

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 reduce the impact of that disability on the child’s ability to access the general education academic and social curriculum, through a series of accommodations and specialized instruction.

At Cajal Academy, by contrast, we approach this work through the lens of neuroplasticity. Thus, 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, through specialized diagnostic and 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. 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.

Pointing the way to relieving public school districts’ fiscal crises

Across the country, towns and municipalities are struggling to meet their obligations under federal education law to provide a free and appropriate education (“FAPE”) for all students living within their districts. Some parents may resist designation for services or an outplacement to a specialized setting out of fear of the stigma that may attach if their child is seen as having a “disability.” Some parents, having been told that there is nothing they can do to remediate their child’s challenges and thus that they must accept packages of accommodations instead, worry that attending a “special education school” may hurt their child’s chances of getting into college by revealing a weakness that would impair their future academic performance. Meanwhile, other parents may push for an outplacement that the district fears will have long term, significant financial impacts that impede their ability to meet the educational needs of a broader base of students. In still other cases, students are assessed as no longer requiring special education long before their parents see changes in their children’s functioning outside of school, leading to conflict between parents and teachers where collaboration is instead required.

We can’t solve all these problems, however our work suggests that with a different model for implementing the demands of the IDEA, we can shift this equation and provide a very different financial and educational “return on the investment.” Currently, 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. This reflects our success rate in identifying and remediating the specific neurocognitive and/or neurophysio deficits driving their challenges: changes that translate across settings and are sustained over time.

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 deficitis 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. However, 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. Some students (including those who are profoundly gifted and/or who have significant sensory processing profiles) will benefit from staying in our specialized environment, but migrate towards a tuition level that is akin to local mainstream private schools. Others will successfully be able to return to a mainstream environment. Contact us to learn more about outplacement opportunities for public school districts.

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. Over the course of this school year and next, we look forward to increasing our capacity to perform this work, through partnerships, grants and more so that we can develop the packaged curriculum, learning management technology tools and training programs required for others to replicate our work.

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.

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.