We’ve made a break-through for the field of education, by leveraging connections between the body and the brain to accelerate learning while transforming learning profiles

Cajal Academy puts the science behind body-brain connections at the heart of our program, through a whole new model for school—redefining what education can do

Three fundamental shifts in our understanding of how children learn, socialize and grow are at the heart of Cajal Academy’s groundbreaking program. Both are by now well-established in the scientific literature. Until now, neither has been operationalized in our schools.

1. The human brain is constantly rewiring itself to improve its ability to do the things we ask it to do (a principle called Neuroplasticity).

2. Each skill we learn builds on a neural foundation developed through the skills that you’ve learned before.

3. Connections between the body and the brain play a big a role in our learning and social-emotional experiences (both positively and negatively), just as our emotions do.

Putting these three core principles together, we’re unlocking children’s gifts through research-backed approaches that are proving successful at transforming learning disabilities like dyslexia, dyspraxia, language processing disorders and dyspraxia.

Neuroscience points the way for how education can meet the needs of a more diverse group of kids

We believe passionately that we can best move forward as a culture and as a nation by digging into the science of what makes us different from one another, and then using that knowledge to create new educational and cultural frameworks that authentically build common ground between us. These differences are real and ever-present in the classroom; the question is only whether the student will bear the burden of bridging those gaps, or whether we will put a framework in place that gives the teacher agency to help their students do so—and that empowers therapists to apply the strategies and skills they already have to actually close gaps in student abilities rather than just churn them over, year after year, through accommodations.

Here are some of the ways that these principles are embedded in all we do.

We’re making special education more effective, while decreasing its cost

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.

The result is a fundamentally different approach to special education, under which we close the gap between the child’s current “Not Yet Skills” (as we call them) and their strengths, rather than just accommodate for the different between their “disabilities” and the abilities of their mainstream peers. For the gifted and “twice exceptional” kids that we work with, the results of this approach can be dramatic, with rapid improvements in both learning and such wide-ranging social-emotional impacts as perfectionism, academic anxiety, demand avoidance, school refusal and disruptive classroom behaviors.

Economically, this translates to a totally different “ROI” or “return on investment” for our families, and for sending school districts. Our students have made up as many as 6 grade levels in reading and writing in as little as 6 months, and transformed from socially isolated to recognized social leaders. Some students who come to Cajal with even significant special education needs may be able to transition from Cajal back to a mainstream “general education” population after only a few years, drastically reducing their cost over the course of their educational lifetime.

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