Reducing or even removing learning and in some cases social-emotional disabilities by “rewiring the brain” to better perform the affected skills

Scientists used to believe that the human brain becomes fixed by the end of early childhood. It turns out that they were wrong.

In fact, the human brain is constantly rewiring itself to re-assign neurons away from those networks in the brain that we use to perform tasks that we rarely do, and adding them to those networks that we need to perform tasks that we frequently ask it to do. This is a task-driven process, and that means that by being intentional about our actions, we can drive this process.

Cajal Academy has made a break-through for the field of education. Our Neuroplasticity Interventions are a research-backed process that operationalizes these scientific insights and is proving successful at reducing or even removing learning and social-emotional disabilities. This is a comprehensive, data-driven approach to identifying and then strengthening the specific neurocognitive and neurophysio skill deficiencies that drive their challenges in the classroom, socially and in the community. We then rebuild those skills from the ground up. We incorporate this work into a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary treatment plan, called a “Catalyst,” that activates student growth through Agency & Growth Mindset coaching that helps students understand and assimilate this change in their neuropsychological profile in real time—and find the courage to use those new abilities in the classroom.

Here is how that process works:

Once we have identified the specific neurocognitive or neurophysiological skill holding a child back, we work backwards down the neuro-developmental chain to find where a critical skill got missed, and develop multi-disciplinary treatment plans that shift seamlessly between physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech and language pathology, visual processing therapy, sensory therapy and psychology to systematically build up each of the skills required to perform those activities where the child is seen to struggle, from the bottom up. This research-backed approach recognizes that complex, higher order skills like reading and writing require that you employ a number of “splinter” skills at once—and each of those splinter skills employs a neural network in the brain that is laid down on broader networks that were built up in an earlier developmental stage.

This analysis will be different for every child, even where they share the same diagnoses or classroom presentations. The relevant question is where in the scaffold of skills required to perform the tasks that challenge them is the vulnerability that drives that presentation. Thus, we create a customized Catalyst program for each student who is not yet able to fully access their gifts at the time that they come to Cajal, and students progress seamlessly through the process with attendant tuition decreases as the complexity of the clinical required does as well.

This process gets behind the diagnostic labels that are used to describe what those challenges look like, and centers the inquiry on what we can actually do to solve those problems.

For many bright students with learning difficulties like ADHD or delays in reading or written expression, these difficulties are symptomatic of vulnerabilities in our most foundational skills. This includes integrating primitive reflexes that keep our children alive as newborns, but that can cause inefficiencies (and thus frustrations) as we try to do more sophisticated tasks that are undermined by these hard-wired shortcuts in directions that may undermine the task at hand. Core visual and language processing skills that we need for social interactions and the internal monitoring required for emotional and sensory regulation rely on these skills as well.

Many of the very bright students we serve skipped steps in their early childhood development, or invested in more intellectual and less physical interests. The cost goes beyond the trope of the “clumsy genius:” without these frameworks, our children must rely upon other, less efficient ways to scaffold these tasks through their high analytical abilities. Yet there is a limit to how far this strategy can go, as both curriculum demands and social interactions become increasingly complex as the child progresses through later elementary school and middle school, with a big jump up for high school and eventually college. This may present as ADHD, social cognition challenges, low frustration tolerance, heightened anxieties, task avoidance, school refusal—and is also highly correlated with learning disabilities.

Our program draws on established research in the field and physical therapy techniques that use movement to develop new neural pathways integrating these primitive reflexes into a more robust and efficient foundation for academic, social-emotional and daily living activities. Our work bears out the science that we can circle back to and re-wire these connections, and that when we strengthen these seemingly non-academic skills, it can have an outsized impact across multiple learning, social-emotional and daily living activities, as they are essential to all learning activities.

Once these early neurodevelopmental foundations have been established, the next state is to reintegrate and then enhance the neural networks that rely upon those foundations and provide a framework for the increasingly sophisticated “splinter skills” we need to perform a range of academic, daily living and social tasks. These skills are developed through applications of physical therapy to improving gross motor sequencing and planning that have been established in other clinical settings. Where the student has multiple learning disabilities or weaknesses in multiple foundational skills, the work is more complex and it should be expected to take longer to progress.

For instance, distinguishing the letters “b/d/p/q” requires a sophisticated visual discrimination skill. The neural network to perform that skill is built on top of the broader neural network, developed in early childhood as we learn to crawl, that allows us to discriminate our left from right and hands from feet—and then coordinate movement among them. Working with student having dyslexia diagnoses and struggle to make these gross motor distinctions, we have been successful at reducing these letter reversals by improving their ability to make the seemingly unrelated gross motor discrimination. In the process, all of the other higher order skills that rely on that same neural network also became more efficient, improving the child’s quality of life.

Students whose difficulties are rooted in these foundational level skills will enroll at Cajal with a Frameworks Catalyst program and progress to our stage 3 Catalyst as those skills are enhanced.

The final stage in the process is to enhance and activate those refined “splinter” skills that we use in different combinations for specific tasks like reading, writing or making social inferences. These skills are targeted through Neuroplasticity Interventions: a specialized application of occupational therapy to target a specific neurocognitive skill that was developed here at Cajal Academy. This includes, for instance, increasing the number of letters that a child can recall in sequence from 2 to 5 or 6, thus enabling them to remember sight words (“orthographic processing”) or improving a teen’s ability to pick up visual information, thus increasing his responsiveness to non-verbal social cues.

As these more sophisticated, “splinter” skills are enhanced, parents, teachers and the student themselves may see a sudden increase in their observed abilities, however it is important that the work be continued to make these new neural connections and the networks that connect them with the networks used for other sub-processes required for that learning or social task more resilient. This activates these new abilities and ensures that the student is not only able to keep up at the level of the current curriculum and/or social demand, but to access their full potential as the complexity of that work continues to increase.

As work at this stage progresses, the child’s Catalyst will gradually be reduced until the targeted neurocognitive and neurophysio skills have been developed and the student is ready to shift to making these skills more resilient while further developing their intellectual gifts through mastery of the Vision to Voice curriculum.

This work is integrated throughout the child’s program, through collaboration across our clinical and educator teams. In the initial phases of the student’s program, we apply accommodations and differentiate students’ academic curriculum to reduce the barriers posed by their challenges so that they are able to experience and access their gifts. These supports are reduced over time in lock step with increases in their ability to perform those skills.

As the student’s skills are developed, this is also infused into our Growth Mindset and Agency Coaching, which helps them to understand their own profiles, how that informs their experiences, and the neuroscience behind our interventions. This fosters an authentic growth mindset, and compassion towards themselves for those “Not Yet Skills” where they still continue to grow.

Student Catalysts (and costs) decrease as their abilities increase

This process is a continuous journey, and students enter Cajal at every stage along the way. During the admissions process, our clinicians will evaluate the data in your child’s profile and make both formal and informal observations and assessments to help them determine the initial stage of neurodevelopmental work that will be required. Student Catalysts (and associated tuitions) are reduced as the student’s abilities increase, until the student is ready to focus on mastering the skills in our Vision to Voice curriculum for all students.

Changing the learning curve, and its end point

Throughout the Catalyst process described above, each child’s academic instruction is differentiated to reduce demand for those particular learning skills that we have identified as being impaired while the work to develop them increases. This gives the child the opportunity to step back from any academic or social trauma they may have experienced associated with the impacted learning tasks: an essential step because of the negative impact that trauma has on all learning abilities. This also gives a break in time that allows the student to step back from an identity as one who “can’t read” or “doesn’t write.” Once the foundational and/or splinter skill deficiencies that were identified as primary drivers of their learning disabilities have been improved, we begin increasing demand for that task in the classroom, in order to build up those neural networks that are required to integrate those foundational skills together and perform the complex academic tasks, like reading, writing, math and organizing one’s thinking, where the child had been struggling.

With this approach, we see a meaningfully different growth curve than would be expected under traditional methodologies. Under traditional approaches, kids who have a large skill gap between skills needed to perform common academic tasks like reading or writing tend to show relatively steady incremental progress at a fairly even rate, with the ultimate reading ability being capped at the child’s weakest skills.

Under Cajal Academy’s methodology, we instead see that the child’s ability to perform the integrated skill (ie, reading, writing or making inferences) remains relatively flat during the time that we are working to build up the relative weaknesses among them. This is to be expected, because we are not yet building up the integrating networks between those skills at this stage. However, once those skill gaps are closed we see a “hockey stick” growth curve in their ability to perform that integrated academic ability, often before work has even begun to meaningfully re-integrate those skills, because the child is now able to experience the benefits of those splinter skills where they already had strengths. As this occurs, the child’s Catalyst is faded out (and tuition reduced), and the child’s work shifts to making these newly-enhanced skills more resilient to prepare the child to maintain a high level of academic performance as the complexity of both curriculum and social demands increase as the child progresses into high school and college.

Over the six years that we have developed these protocols, the results for our students have been nothing short of transformative, across a wide array of profiles. These include a middle schooler who jumped from a 1st to a 7th grade level in both reading and writing in a single year, because we identified and addressed the dyspraxia that was driving it; an early elementary student with dyslexia who jumped from below to above reading level in a single year because we built up the splinter skills that made it difficult for them to remember what words look like (orthographic processing) — a key component of reading; a high schooler who overcame the physical, emotional and cognitive impacts of a spinal cord defect and graduated from Cajal ready to study architecture at RISD: the top art school in the country; and social changes that parents see at home within as little as a 4 week summer program.

Want to know more? Watch these short videos on neuroplasticity: