Skills-based curriculum for innovative thinkers
Our academic and social-emotional curriculum is purpose-built to develop the skills that our innovative cohort of students will need for a future defined by their strengths
Our Vision to Voice Curriculum develops the skills that bright and gifted kids need to realize their unique ways of seeing the world as new products, scientific discoveries and artistic creations that can benefit us all. This goes beyond the Connecticut state curriculum requirements (though we meet those too) and traditional tenants of “gifted education” to develop the super-sized executive function, peer collaboration, social leadership and growth mindset that this requires.
For students who struggle in these areas, the curriculum is heavily scaffolded using the data-driven differentiation, coaching and specialized instruction included in their Student Growth Catalysts. This neuroscience-based approach has proven successful at reducing or even removing learning and in some cases social-emotional challenges, making our student profiles highly dynamic with some students seeing dramatic improvements in as short as a year. Our Catalyst Method uses the data in each student’s profile to meet them where they are and then enhances the deficient skills that interfere with their ability to access and enjoy their areas of strength. Our Vision to Voice Curriculum ensures that they have the skills they need to engage in the pursuits that they are likely to find intellectually rewarding on the other end of that journey. That culminates in our Senior Capstone Project, which transfers agency over the learning process to the student: a central tenant of our portrait of a Cajal Academy graduate.
All aspects of our academic and social-emotional curricula are purpose-built to develop these skills, as is the framework of our program itself. This curriculum is delivered, for all learners, through project-based learning, social-emotional skills and specialized coaching that gives them a sense of agency over their own experience while fostering a growth mindset. Each of these areas is scaffolded and differentiated for our students who have learning, social-emotional and/or neurophysio differences. Learn more about those components below.
Standards-Based Academics through Project-based Learning
Our inter-disciplinary approach to project-based learning delivers all the same curriculum standards that students learn in Connecticut public schools, while introducing them to new ideas & potential careers. Each project provides a real world application, helping them develop their vision of the change they want to help create, and demands integration of perspectives and material across math, science, language arts, social studies and visual arts, thus developing the critical thinking skills required to turn information into novel insights & the executive function skills they’ll need to turn these insights into action.
Data-driven differentiation, movement integrated into the classroom through our exclusive Body-Informed Learning and our Neuro-and Trauma-Informed Approach to task avoidance make these projects accessible to students who aren’t yet fully able to access their gifts, while we work to build up those skills through our exclusive, Catalyst Method for reducing special education needs through a neuroscience-based approach.
Social and Leadership Skills
Our leadership curriculum turns social learners into social leaders, through a toolbox they can use to foster truly inclusive, neurodiverse communities, & the communication tools they need to give voice to their visions, so that others will follow them.
Agency & Growth Mindset Coaching
Our agency & growth mindset coaching helps students master strategies to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for their needs, and to foster an authentic growth mindset.
The Skills in our Innovator’s Toolbox
Essential life skills for gifted and twice exceptional thinkers, developed by our visionary co-founder and Head of School
Our Vision to Voice Curriculum was developed by our co-founder Cheryl Viirand: a social entrepreneur and former corporate litigator who is both mom to twice exceptional children and from a twice exceptional family of origin herself. She developed this curriculum to deliver the skills that she knows makes the difference between having the tools to turn your visions into a voice and your insights into action, or a future in which your unique ways of seeing the world carry the disappointment of dreams not realized. It is her play to reduce the long-term rates of anxiety, depression, social isolation and even suicidal ideation that is common in this cohort of children and the adults that they become.
Cheryl works directly with the students in our program, providing our Growth Mindset and Agency coaching using methodologies she developed to help gifted and twice exceptional students apply their high analytical skills to social and emotional experiences and derive their own lessons from them: knowledge that transfers across settings as they progress towards a future defined by their strengths.
Differentiation and development over each student’s journey towards empowerment
Our Vision to Voice Curriculum is an integral part of our framework for preparing some of our highest-potential students to be ready to succeed not just professionally but socially and emotionally in college and as the adults they will become. In developing each student’s program, we start by looking not at the future prospects that seem likely for the profile that they have when they join us, but at what the future would look like if you could strip away the challenges that hold them back and give them one defined by their gifts. Then we reverse-engineer from that future back to the present, to understand the skills they will need to develop as we work to reduce those challenges utilizing our exclusive, research-backed Catalyst Method.
This may sound unrealistic, but this is precisely what we successfully did for our first graduate, who is now a design major at the top college for his field, where he is being successful academically and socially because he mastered this very toolbox of skills. You can read that story here, and contact us to see how we can prepare your child for the future they are meant to lead.
Individualization for the Not Yet Skills in each child’s Compass
We differentiate our academic and social-emotional curriculum for each student using their Cajal Compass: a snapshot of the “Not Yet Skills” that can impede their access to their strengths as of this stage in their journey. This snapshot is updated as students make progress through their Student Growth Catalyst until it is faded out. At that stage, the student’s program focuses on making newly-acquired skills more resilient, independently mastering the thought-leadership skills in our Vision to Voice Curriculum and further exploring and developing their strengths.
Portrait of a Cajal Graduate: not just college-ready but life-ready
Those students who stay at Cajal through their senior year will shift from learning new skills to building the resilience and independence that will be essential in college and beyond. All seniors are required to conduct a Senior Capstone Project, independently applying our methodology to develop their own project-based learning in an area that interests them. The net result is a graduate who is empowered as a global citizen, a scholar, a leader, a social actor and with the skills they need to optimize their own learning, social and emotional experiences. These are essential skills for college, and for turning their unique vision for the world into leadership in their chosen field down the road.