All our students receive highly-individualized Growth Mindset Coaching: a catalyst that turns new skills into real-world progress that they can feel
Research shows that simply believing that you can improve at a given task improves performance and helps to make that goal a reality. And yet, for twice exceptional kids who’ve struggled for years with unidentified learning disabilities or other academic struggles, it takes a lot more than platitudes to convince them that things will get better if they just “keep trying.” These are, after all, extremely bright kids who are looking back at what may be years of “data points” in which they tried their best and yet things did not improve.
Growth Mindset Coaching is an essential component of each student’s personalized educational program at Cajal Academy. Our highly-individualized coaching model is delivered by our Head of School or another member of the staff who has intimate knowledge of all aspects of the child’s academic, emotional, social, neuropsychological and neurophysiological profile, and centers on helping the student to understand the neuroscience behind their experiences, and how their program is helping them to shift those underlying foundational skills through neuroplasticity. This makes it safe to believe that growth is possible, and becomes the catalyst that helps them find the courage to try again to perform tasks that have been difficult for them in the past—-thus discovering the new abilities that they have bult up over the course of the program. This goes hand in hand with our Agency Coaching, which helps students to learn how to maintain regulation in the moment, so that they have the emotional resilience to do so. Both these coaching efforts leverage our cohort’s high analytical skills to fuel an authentic growth mindset, by teaching them the science behind their challenges (be they learning, social-emotional or neurophysiological) so they have the information they need to understand logically how a given intervention works—thus making it rational to believe that growth is possible.
Here are some of the core tenants of our Growth Mindset Coaching model:
Our Growth Mindset Coaching connects the dots to propel academic and social-emotional growth
Every academic and social experience at Cajal Academy is designed to help students better understand and master their own social-emotional journeys. Our intellectually-exciting academic curriculum is a central motivator in this process—and is used as a “foil” to help us tease out and address the specific challenges that hold back this child’s academic growth, emotional resilience and social skills.
This process starts with a deep dive by our multi-disciplinary clinical team to understand their unique mix of discrete neuropsychological and neurophysiological skills and how those skills combine to influence their daily experiences. From there, our team develops a comprehensive program of Neuroplasticity Interventions to build up low-lying skills; Academic Programming tailored to reduce interference from their Not Yet Skills while this work progresses so that they can experience their strengths; Agency Coaching giving the student strategies they can use to increase their emotional regulation by leveraging connections between their physical and learning or emotional states to optimize their experiences at every stage in this process, and Growth Mindset Coaching helping the students to bring these threads together to propel their academic and social-emotional growth.
We give kids a rational reason to believe that growth is possible, by sharing with them the science behind it all
We share the neuroscience, neurophysiology and biology required to understand both the child’s challenges and the neuroscience behind our interventions—starting with the principle of neuroplasticity. This gives students the content they need to understand their own needs and strategies just as they would any other academic curriculum.
Very bright kids like the ones in our cohort, is that very often children have come to these negative self-views through a rational process, based on repeated experiences of attempting a learning task only to run headlong into one of the their hidden challenges, without a lens they could use to predict and prepare themselves for that to happen. Sharing the science behind it all gives them a rational basis to believe that things can improve.
We help kids turn theory into real-world, in-the-moment growth
It is not enough that students understand intellectually that growth is possible (although that is certainly essential!); they have to develop new patterns of thought and behavior to make that knowledge actionable in real time. We help our students act on those new understandings in real time through proactive supports like our Yets Boards and through on-demand supports like our on-demand, flowcharting process. Learn more about these powerful and inter-related supports below.
We help kids identify the fears that work against a growth mindset
For students with uneven neuropsychological profiles, hypervigilance to failure is common—and is one of the biggest hurdles to actual growth. One of the many ways we use our powerful flowcharting process is to help students identify how fears of academic and/or social “failure” drive task avoidance, poor self-image or a harmful conviction that they cannot grow. This is a deeply collaborative process, conducted by our Head of School or another staff member having intimate knowledge of the many overlapping components of each child’s profile, and guides the student in a self-reflective process of applying their strong analytical skills to understand their fears—so that they can overcome them. We often see noticeable, sustained and non-linear growth in response to each flowcharting process, as the child gains increasing insights into why they do what they do.
We break down abstract goals into concrete steps, through “The Yets”
Each student at Cajal has a “Yets Board,” with a highly-individualized set of short-term, concrete ‘next steps’ that help the child take the next steps towards mastering their long term goals and assimilating them into their day to day activities as new habits, thought patterns and behavior. Abstract concepts like “growth mindset” are broken down into very granular, scaffolded skills, like “try something even though you think it will be hard.” These smaller goals are reinforced throughout the day through self-assessments, along with the granular, scaffolded skills required for their individualized self-regulation strategies.
We empower kids to overcome task avoidance and even school refusal by helping them find the courage to try hard things
We reject the notion that bright, gifted and ‘twice exceptional’ kids can only be educated through their own interests—because our work proves otherwise. When the bright kids we serve refuse a task, we understand that through the trauma lens of protecting oneself from what you expect may be failure. We tackle this head on through coaching and instruction to understand their own profiles.
We give kids agency over their experiences through individualized coaching in how to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for their needs
Maintaining a growth mindset requires courage and the ability to monitor and manage self-regulation needs. Each child’s program incorporates physio tools students can use to maximize access to their skills, and Agency Coaching to help them bring those skills in the moments when they need them most.
Community
A Community Culture that Accelerates Growth
At Cajal, growth mindset is a team sport. The same Neuro- and Trauma-Informed Approach that fuels our Growth Mindset Coaching fuels our community-centered social skills curriculum as well. By placing the focus on how to foster truly inclusive and scientifically-informed communities (taking the pressure off of behaviorally-loaded concepts like “following the rules” that are often associated with prior school trauma), our community of students has a culture of shared progress, in which students celebrate each others’ progress towards what may be very different goals, and are rewarded for cheering on a peer’s accomplishments in areas that already come easily to the child who is doing the cheering. This provides what will for many kids be a first experience of being able to safely acknowledge and receive support for their struggles within a peer community, fostering life-long skills in seeking and accepting support for our challenges.
Counseling and Trauma Support
It is not enough that we build up their neurological capacity to perform low-lying skills; we must also break down psychological barriers and storylines that only stand in the way of progress, like “I’m bad,” “I’m stupid,” or “I don’t fit.” These negative self-beliefs, if not addressed, can themselves act as a learning disability by denying a child the sense of safety that’s required for learning to begin. Each student has weekly counseling sessions with Dr. Mattis, our school’s Psychologist and Director of Research, who is a recognized neuropsychologist. Dr. Mattis brings decades of experience working with complex and twice exceptional kids as a clinician, researcher and academic, and has published extensively on how an individual’s neurophysiology influences learning, behavior and emotional experiences. He weaves this expertise into his work with our students, helping them to understand how discrepant skill gaps in their neuropsychological profile and hidden neurophysiological events combine to impact their day to day experiences. This approach is particularly powerful for students who come to Cajal following experiences of academic trauma in other settings.