When a child struggles academically or socially, it is easy to identify psychological drivers behind those challenges, from fear of failure and prior school-based trauma, to task avoidance or attention seeking. This approach fails to appreciate that in fact, for all of us our learning and social-emotional experiences are directly influenced by our relative skill levels with respect to each of the many skills required to perform them on the one hand, and by hidden neurophysiologic events that determine our ability to access those skills on the other hand.

This means that we can empower kids to optimize their own learning and social-emotional experiences by coaching them in how to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for those hidden neurophysiologic events and to maintain a state of self-regulation in the face of them. This goes beyond therapeutic strategies like CBT/DBT, which improve a child’s resilience in the face of dysregulation, by teaching the child how to correct the dysregulation itself, utilizing physio-based strategies.

These neuroscience-based understandings are at the heart of our “Neuro- and Trauma-Informed Approach:” a fundamental shift in how we understand children’s learning and social-emotional needs that drives our pioneering program and the transformative results it has brought for children since our founding in 2019.

The first step towards empowering students to have agency over their experiences is to step back from looking at their academic or behavioral outcomes and focus instead on their neurophysiological inputs.

Neuropsychological research reveals that a wide range of factors can alter the function of the brain in ways that influence behaviors. For instance, a child with ADHD might be overwhelmed by a chaotic environment, leading them to run about the room despite firm instructions to be still. Similarly, a child who has experienced adverse childhood experiences (from the loss of a parent to the stress or even humiliation of struggling over “simple” tasks due to an undiagnosed learning difference) might suddenly be sent into a survival state by any number of idiosyncratic and seemingly unpredictable triggering events.

Current research also reveals that many children’s behaviors are also influenced by a range of hidden and observable neurophysiological factors, from the negative effects of chronic pain on working memory, to integrating and filtering our sensory inputs. We integrate these insights into our program. For example, children who do not regulate body temperature well may be thrown into a state of rage if they become either too hot or too cold—a problem that can be managed with an ice pack or a blanket, respectively, but not through admonitions to “calm down.” Thus, we coach these students in how to monitor their core body temperature, prioritize its impacts in their decision-making, advocate for their temperature regulation needs–and above all, separate this challenge from their self-esteem by understanding the science behind it.

Leveraging the research and expertise of our internationally-renowned neuropsychologist and expert licensed occupational and physical therapists, this process starts with a data-driven process to identify the range of factors that influence this child’s level of regulation, through review of their prior evaluations, additional assessments and observations of our expert clinical team and, for students with complex regulation profiles including chronic medical conditions and/or mood disorders, collaboration with the child’s medical team or psychiatrist.

All students must feel safe in order to learn but in order to experience emotional safety, they must be in a state of neurophysiologic regulation. This comes automatically for students with typical neurophysiologic functioning, but not for students who have difficulties maintaining a safe and even core body temperature, immunological instability such as mast cell activation syndrome, neurovascular inefficiencies as are seen in postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (“POTS”) and other autonomic regulatory disorders.

These students can however be taught over time how to better monitor these shifts in their internal states, select appropriate mitigating strategies and advocate for their needs and the temporary impacts on cognitive and/or emotional regulation that these shifts cause. This starts with building up the visceral map they need to monitor shifts in their state of self-regulation, through structured sensory sessions with which the students start each day and other strategies led by our licensed occupational and physical therapists. This multi-layered process is built into each child’s Student Growth Catalyst. This process is essential for these students’ short-term behavioral, social and academic development and performance—and long-term mental health and independence. As such, this work is an essential component of school districts’ obligations for students’ social-emotional instruction and their obligation to provide specialized instruction to students in how to manage their medical needs.

As the child becomes increasingly able to monitor and communicate shifts in their internal states, our clinicians develop Personalized Strategies that each child can use to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for their needs as of each stage of the developmental or healing process. For those students with complex medical conditions, this includes developing strategies for mitigating symptoms and reducing symptom flares. The strategies selected will depend on the nature of the trigger, but also other aspects of the child’s sensory, movement and neuropsychological profile.

For some kids, this is a relatively straight-forward process. However, many children kids have multiple overlapping factors, any one of which can independently challenge their ability to maintain self-regulations. Our multi-disciplinary team collaborates to develop a cohesive set of strategies that the child can use to self-monitor across all of their triggers or areas of need, as they are identified, to match the inter-related nature of their life-lived experiences.

The strategies we develop to help a child self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for their needs are only effective to if the child learns how to apply them in the moment. This may require developing whole new skills, and letting go of negative feedback that they have emotionally absorbed. We drive this process through Agency Coaching: an intervention developed at Cajal Academy that helps students understand the role that shifts in their regulation levels have on their academic and social-emotional experiences. The focus of this coaching is on learning how to identify what triggers your reactions, but also to differentiate between your outwardly-observable responses and the various emotional and/or physiologic reactions that drive them. This process, administered by our Head of School, integrates insights from across their educational, social and neurophysiological profiles and utilizes flowcharting to help students understand even complex individual and inter-personal interactions, and over time learn to interrupt those processes. This gradual and scaffolded approach has proved successful at helping students learn to manage even highly complex neurophysiological profiles. The insights gained through this approach are shared with the clinical team, leading to increasingly precise understandings of the child’s experience and with that, how they can learn to interrupt those processes to have better agency over their social and academic access.

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