We meet kids where they are, and help them develop the social and leadership skills they’ll need when they become who they want to be
Being someone who naturally sees the world in unique ways is a blessing, but without the peer collaboration and social communication skills required to communicate those ideas to others and to do so in a way that makes others want to follow them can turn into a curse. These are skills that all innovative thinkers need, and yet this is an area where many intellectually gifted students struggle.
All Cajal Academy students receive the Leadership Skills instruction within our Voice to Vision Curriculum, developing the peer collaboration, communication and social leadership skills required to give voice to your vision so others want to follow your leadership. For those students who have social or emotional challenges, we apply the same data-driven and neuroscientifically-based approach that we do to learning differences, through a Student Growth Catalyst.
Use the links below to find out more about this scaffolded approach to social-emotional learning.
We create organic opportunities to develop peer collaboration skills
We build peer collaboration into each project project-based learning, tailored to what each student is ready for today. We take a scaffolded approach to building this essential leadership ability, including listening to opposing views, perspective taking and compromise, and use our Catalyst Method to build up foundational skills for students who struggle in these areas.
We foster empathy by teaching kids how to understand each others’ actions through the lens of their “Not Yet Skills”
Social interactions rely on complex neurocognitive and neurophysiological skills, so uneven neuropsychological profiles can deeply affect communication, social interpretation, and emotional resilience. We help students understand these connections and how their “Not Yet Skills” shape their social actions, fostering empathy for both themselves and others. Our Human 101 curriculum supports this by providing a scientific framework within an academic context.
We teach students a transferable toolset for fostering community
Instead of “school rules,” we maintain a community-wide code that helps students come to understand their impacts on others on a spectrum from fostering community to destroying it. We teach students the value of acts of kindness as a way to create the communities you wan to be part of: a lens that allows even kids who struggle with social cognition to be successful in settings outside of our school. The result is that even Cajal students who have struggled socially in the past have been recognized in the community-based settings that matter to them most for the social and leadership skills that they’ve acquired in our small setting.
We accelerate social growth through our small, mixed age community
Many gifted and twice exceptional students find that they more easily find kinship with people who are older or younger than themselves than they do with same-age peers. We believe there are a number of reasons behind this, and use this to our students’ advantage by having a mixed age community of peers that gives older students mentoring and leadership opportunities, while offering powerful role models for their younger peers. For students whose social anxieties or social challenges have held back their enjoyment of social interactions previously, we find that the combination of our skills-based approach and our small environment accelerates social growth, by giving students the space and nurturing community they need to develop those skills, leading to outsized social growth within community-based settings and activities.
Learn more about our Vision to Voice Curriculum and the skills in our “toolbox” for innovative thinkers
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Immediate, Summer & Fall Placements
Individualized social-emotional learning
It is not uncommon for bright and gifted students to struggle socially, as complexities in neuropsychological profiles can undermine social experiences just as they do academic ones. We support these learning needs through a systematic and neuroscience-based approach, with data-driven and highly-individualized programs implemented through our Student Growth Catalysts. Apply today to find out how this could help accelerate your child’s growth.