We don’t accommodate children’s educational profiles. We transform them, through a paradigm shift in how we understand an address the challenges holding them back.

Cajal Academy’s expert, visionary team has made a break through for the field of education with a new, research-backed program that is creating transformational changes for kids that have not previously been thought possible.

These changes start with identifying and developing the specific neurocognitive and neurophysiologic skills that hold a child back—literally rewiring the brain to remove obstacles to their academic and social-emotional growth. This is paired with a systematic approach to developing growth mindset and agency, alongside coaching in how to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for their needs.

The results can be transformational, not just in school but in the community and at home. Scroll down to learn more about our students’ transformative changes.

This is a major break-through for the field of special education, and we believe it has the power to revolutionize education more generally. Apply today to see how our approach can help your child, or consider making a donation to support this important work!

Each student’s program at Cajal starts with identifying, at a very granular level, the specific challenges holding them back across academic and social-emotional spheres. All learning and social activities are in fact a bundle of individual neurocognitive and neurophysiological tasks. In order to excel at that task, we need to excel at each of its component skills as well. Turning this around, if we can build up a child’s capacity to perform cognitive and physiological skills that are required for a range of learning, social and emotional experiences, then we can make meaningful improvements in their life-lived experiences. This is a fundamental principle behind Cajal Academy’s approach, and one that makes us meaningfully different from other special education schools.

Then our multi-disciplinary clinical team develops a data-driven program to build up the skills they need to propel their academic and social-emotional growth, through a combination of traditional therapies and Neuroplasticity Interventions developed at Cajal Academy that use movement and games to directly target and enhance the neural network a child needs to perform a given neurocognitive skill.

Our research-backed, ground-breaking interventions rewire the brain to reduce or even remove learning disabilities themselves—not just the barriers they create—for sustainable, transformative change.

Our research-backed, ground-breaking approach is proving successful at remediating learning disabilities that other schools can only accommodate, like dyspraxia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, language processing disorders and some forms of ADHD.

Our expert team made a paradigm shift in how we understand learning disabilities, getting beneath the diagnostic labels they’re given to identify the specific neurocognitive deficits that drives them, using the data in each child’s profile to work down the neuro-developmental chain that underpins that skill to identify deficient links that drive the learning disability in the first place. Then we made a second paradigm shift in how we treat them: we leverage the connections between the body and human learning to build up the child’s neural capacity to perform that skill (a process known as neuroplasticity) through a series of carefully-scaffolded movement.

The results are actual reductions or even complete removal of learning disabilities that don’t respond to other techniques, in as little as a single school year. Find out how our ground-breaking approach can redefine what’s possible for your child.

We propel emotional growth across settings by helping kids to understand their actions and experiences—and those of their peers—as a reflection of their current neuropsychogical and neurophysiological profiles

Our Neuro- and Trauma-Informed Approach, developed at Cajal Academy, is based on the reality that every learning, social and daily living activity demands that we exercise a different mix of “splinter skills” in the moment, so growing up with large gaps between those splinter skills where you excel and those where you falter can be an incredibly frustrating and confusing experience. Add to this hidden neurophysiological events undermining access to even your strongest skills, such as the sensory processing disorders that are prevalent within intellectually-gifted kids, and the child’s life-lived experience can come to feel like an unpredictable and arbitrary mess. Within academic settings, this can lead far too many kids to fall into a reflexive resistance to new tasks and subject matters, as they lack a lens with which to predict which tasks will be disappointingly easy, and which will be impenetrably hard. In far too many cases, the result is anxiety, depression, social isolation and academic trauma, within a cohort of kids for whom school should be an intellectual playground.

Our program has proven successful at helping students to understand and disentangle these difficulties in real time, leading to sustained progress that transfers across settings. Learn more about this powerful new approach.

We give kids a toolbox they can use to foster truly-inclusive neurodivergent communities, and personalized social-emotional learning that helps them access their social skills in real time

Cajal’s exclusive social-emotional curriculum and approach fosters an authentic growth mindset, and turns social learning into social leadership, by helping them to understand both their own actions and those of their peers through the lens of the “Not Yet Skills” in their unique profiles that inform their social actions. This transformative process works hand-in-hand with our work to reduce learning disabilities, and starts with the same deep dive to understand the data in their profiles and how that drives their social profiles. Disconnects in social cognition are addressed alongside coaching work helping students to understand—and gain agency over—their self-regulation and social needs. Our small setting allows students to focus on skill development, and our parents report that this translates into changes at home and in the community, often within a matter of weeks.

We have brought the science showing how kids’ “wiring” impacts their learning and social experiences into the classroom, with coaching in how to use those levers to optimize their access to learning at school, at home and in the community

From sensory processing to motor coordination, our neurophysiological functioning has a profound effect on a student’s academic and social-emotional experiences. We have brought these realities into the classroom, modelling how students can use movement to increase not only their access to learning but their absorption of academic concepts themselves, through our exclusive Body-Informed Learning pedagogy. We help kids understand body-brain connections scientifically, and give them coaching to apply those understandings to the data in their own unique profiles, leveraging our cohort’s high analytical abilities to give them a lens they can use to optimize their experiences across a range of settings and demands. These tools arose out of our work as the first school in the world that is tailored to meet the complex needs of students with the connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and has since empowered kids with a range of emotional and autonomic regulatory needs. Learn more about our unique, neuroscience-driven approach.

The principles and approach that eventually grew into the protocols, and then the model behind Cajal Academy was borne out of our co-founder’s journey herself and as a mother with the connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Leading edge research in the field of connective tissue disorders focuses on the connections between body systems—so this is where our co-founders started finding leverage to help her children increase their educational access. Yet when they checked the literature, they found that while these connections are more easily observed and influenced in kids who have these conditions, in fact they had tapped into universal human truths. It brings us great pride to be the first school (worldwide, from what we can tell) that is designed for kids with this and other, similarly complex conditions, and to place these typically marginalized kids at the “tip of the spear” of a movement to revolutionize education through all by leveraging modern neuroscience.

Transformational Change starts with a whole new way to define what problem they need our help to solve.

Each student’s program is a little bit different, and combines academic, social-emotional, physio and coaching elements in a carefully-balanced mix that is developed by looking at the data in that child’s neuropsychological and neurophysiological profiles. This process starts by looking at the challenges the child displays today within school, home and community settings, and then applying our team’s hyper-specialized expertise in the neurodevelopmental skills that are necessary to perform those tasks. Then our clinical team takes a “deep dive” into the child’s profile to assess their areas of relative strength and weakness, and based on that the specific neurocognitive deficiencies that are holding them back. Work to address these challenges through our exclusive Neuroplasticity Interventions is then combined with social-emotional skill development and Growth Mindset and Agency coaching to manifest those skill increases in sustainable growth that transfers across settings. Use the links below to learn more about this process.

Learn about how we apply these approaches to common profiles within the cohort of bright, gifted and twice-exceptional kids that we serve