Our Vision to Voice Curriculum teaches the “toolbox” of essential skills that innovative thinkers need to thrive
All aspects of Cajal Academy’s program were engineered from the ground up to develop the critical thinking and executive function skills but also neuroscience-based strategies that students can use to optimize their own learning, social and emotional experiences
Students who have very high analytical reasoning and/or creative thinking skills naturally tend to “connect the dots” differently from those around them—especially where they have a learning, social-emotional or neurophysio difference as well. This powerful ability gives these students the potential to redefine the future in ways that benefit us all—if they have the tools they need to realize those opportunities.
Our Vision to Voice Curriculum was developed by Cajal Academy 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. This Curriculum is delivered in concert with neuroscience-based interventions available only at Cajal Academy, that enhance students’ abilities to perform these core skills while reducing learning and in some cases social-emotional challenges that stand in their way. With this combination, we help our students shift from struggling to keep up with their mainstream peers to ready to lead.
The Innovator’s Toolbox
We built our program from the bottom up to develop these skills, by embedding them into the DNA of our academic and social-emotional curriculum
The skills in our Innovator’s Toolbox are not just “nice to have’s,” they’re essential life skills for the innovative adults our children will become—and they overlap with areas where many gifted and twice exceptional people struggle, like executive function and social skills. These skills are also essential to college success—and can be difficult to build in college if you don’t already have them before you arrive.
We integrate these skills into every aspect of our program—in fact, we developed our core, gifted ed curriculum from the bottom up specifically to teach these skills. And we differentiate that instruction for students whose gifts come with learning, social-emotional or neurophysio challenges, while we apply work progresses to reduce (not just accommodate) those challenges through their Student Growth Catalysts: our ground-breaking, research-backed approach that’s redefining what’s possible through a new, neuroscience-based approach unavailable in other special education programs or settings.
Essential life skills for twice exceptional thinkers
We make these skills accessible to students whose gifts come with learning, social-emotional or neurophysio challenges, through a neuroscience-based approach available only at Cajal Academy that reduces the learning and social-emotional challenges that interfere with their ability to get there.
These skills may initially seem out of reach for students who are still struggling to navigate learning, social-emotional or neurophysiological differences when they come to Cajal. That was the case for Cheryl’s own kids when we started, so we understand that difficult journey and experience not just for kids but for parents as well. This is the fuel that drove our team’s passion to develop our Catalyst Method: a new special education approaches that realize the potential of recent neuroscientific insights to actually reduce or remove those challenges, leading to our research-backed break-through for the field of special education. 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 assimilate these developing skills into an empowered new personal narrative, and to 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.
We’ve seen kids experience changes through this comprehensive approach that are nothing short of transformational; changes that make a future defined by the gifts and the joy of learning and discovery that we parents saw light our children as young kids. That’s why the Vision to Voice Curriculum is so important: it’s not for them to get through this journey we call a K-12 education, it’s so they are prepared to enjoy those gifts and have the skills they need to leverage those abilities to lead us all into the future. For students who stay at Cajal through graduation and our Senior Capstone Project, mastery of those tools translates into empowerment as a global citizen, a scholar, a leader, a social actor and with agency of their own experiences as a human.
For all these reasons, developing this “Innovator’s Toolbox” of skills is an essential component of our mandate for all learners: those who are already able to access their gifts and those who are still working through a Student Growth Catalyst to overcome the obstacles that stand in their way. It is the reason that we utilize collaborative, inter-disciplinary project-based learning to deliver Connecticut state curriculum standards rather than traditional approaches that fails to provide organic opportunities to develop the skills that our bright and gifted cohort of students uniquely needs.
