Cajal Academy’s ground-breaking approach doesn’t accommodate children’s disabilities—it removes the skill deficit that drives them.

Since 2019, Cajal Academy has developed a first-of-its-kind approach to reducing and in some cases eliminating learning disabilities, by using task-driven interventions to build up the neural network the child needs to perform the many discrete skills that they need to perform those learning activities.

This ground-breaking approach, developed at Cajal, builds on the well-established scientific principle that the human brain is constantly rewiring itself as we learn: a principle called “neuroplasticity.” In other words, whether at school or in the course of our everyday activities, our brain isn’t just acquiring new knowledge and information within the confines of its current infrastructure. Rather, it is constantly reallocating resources within that infrastructure to remove resources (neurons) from the networks we need to perform tasks that we are no longer doing, and to add resources to the networks required for the tasks that we use frequently.

This has huge implications for general education, and even bigger ones for special education. For starters, it means that each child’s skills are not static—and thus that learning “disabilities” are not immutable. Rather, they can be developed through an intentioned approach to (1) identifying which specific neurocognitive “splinter” skills are holding the child back and then (2) building up the neural networks required to perform those skills by being strategic about the tasks we ask that child to do.

Equally important though, this means that when we instead accommodate a child’s “disability” through supports that remove the demand to use that skill, we may actually make the problem worse—because as we reduce the demand for that skill, the brain will reallocate those neurons to other neural networks.

Getting behind the diagnostic labels to figure out what’s driving them: a data-driven process

This work is inherently detail-driven. Traditional special education approaches start from diagnoses like “ADHD,” “dyslexia,” “dyscalculia,” “ASD,” etc. These labels are given based on checklists of symptoms in the DSM or diagnostic statistical manual: checklists that were derived through a statistical analysis of what different psychologists are referring to when they use a particular diagnosis label. But this doesn’t tell us what’s driving that presentation. Thus, it only tells us how to accommodate the problem—not how to solve it.

At Cajal, we take a very different approach. We start with the actual performance on learning and social-emotional tasks, and then we dig into the data in the child’s neuropsychological and neurophysio assessments to identify in which of the several discrete neurocognitive skills required to perform those tasks does this child lag behind. Using well-normed assessments and our team’s high level of expertise in understanding what combinations of skills you need to perform a given task, we identify which cross-cutting skills are holding back their performance across a range of academic and social skills and then fashion a carefully scaffolded series of tasks requiring the brain to engage in that particular thought process—so the brain applies more neurons to the neural network required to perform it.

In this way, we are rewiring the child’s brain to apply more resources to those skills they need most to progress. Over time, the struggles in the classroom, and the diagnostic labels that described them, are removed, preparing the child to go forward with a broader array of settings and tasks in which they can be successful.

Transformative results in children’s learning—and in their lives

We have now successfully applied this process to a range of challenges, from reading and writing disabilities to organizational, social-emotional and math difficulties, with often dramatic results.

The brilliant middle school student who could not independently read more than a paragraph without losing track of what the words even mean, or write more than his own name without someone spelling it for him letter by letter in September—and was independently reading 45 to 60 pages a week in February and independently writing a short story while he typed it in April.

The second grader who was several grade levels behind in reading who was described as lacking in “motivation” but who was reading several grade levels ahead just six weeks later—after we discovered that his visual processing challenges were interfering with his ability to retain and recall what words look like: an essential skill for reading.

The hyperlexical nine year old who spoke with the vocabulary of a college professor but curled up in fetal position under his desk when we asked him to write because when he tried to write his brain went blank, who came to see himself as an author after we identified that his difficulties with motor coordination were taking all the neurocognitive resources he needed to perform the skill.

The middle school student who was unable to do basic addition and subtraction but who could draw and make music at an elite level (and thus clearly “understood” math) who broke through once we identified his brain was not retaining sequences, without which one cannot add—or properly parse social feedback, comply with oral directions or many of the other areas where this child struggled.

The profoundly gifted high school student who eschewed movies as “boring” and never felt he fit in or knew how to connect with others, but who started to understand and respond to nonverbal communications after we identified that he wasn’t picking up the salience of visual content and provided a bespoke curriculum (using TV sitcoms as our course material) to academically backfill his knowledge base of how changes in facial expressions correlate to different human emotions.

As these students have made these breakthroughs, we have seen our children transformed not just in their scholarship but in their understandings of themselves. We couple our interventions with growth mindset coaching, to help them find the courage to try the tasks they had previously found difficult and thus to discover what they can now do.

Only at Cajal.

We are unaware of any other school that is approaching special education interventions in this way. And yet, this science is not new. Each of these skills can be identified and indeed quantified through well-established and normed tests administered by neuropsychologists, reading specialists and other therapeutic experts. Thus, we have data that we can use to identify both their relative and absolute strengths and weaknesses, and thus what skill could, if improved, make the biggest difference for the child. Occupational therapists have well-established protocols for everything from handwriting to gross motor coordination that apply neuroplasticity to improve the child’s ability to perform these motor-related skills. We are bringing these two well-established disciplines together in a new way to reduce the gaps in a child’s neurocognitive skills.

Contact us to find out whether your child might benefit from this process and approach, and whether Cajal Academy might be the right fit for their needs.

As with all components of the Cajal Academy program, the third step in this process is to give agency over this work over to the children themselves.

This starts with sharing the science behind the process with the children themselves. When we teach kids how to understand the tasks they do everyday as a composite of individual tasks, and how to understand their own unique mix of strengths and weaknesses, we give them a lens that they can use to predict which tasks will be disappointingly “easy” and which will be impossibly hard. And when we teach them to science of neuroplasticity and explain how each of the tasks we ask them to do contributes towards that effort, we give them a rational reason to believe that things will in fact begin to improve—thus providing an authentic foundation for a growth mindset. It also models a process the students can use in college and beyond to be more conscious of their own learning profiles and feel empowered to improve their own performance by applying the same approaches that we model in our program.

Perhaps most important of all, when we share the science also of neuroplasticity with these highly-analytical kids, we help them to understand that we all have areas where we struggle and others where we shine—and that that’s “just science.” This provides a powerful counter-narrative to messages they may have absorbed on the playground that they are are “bad” or “stupid.” That is an essential step towards reducing the hold that prior academic trauma or anxiety has on so many twice exceptional kids and other complex learners, thereby setting them on the road to independently chart their own course for the future.