Deep engagement with standards-based academics through multi-disciplinary “deep dives” into real world problems.

Project-based learning is a curricular framework that has been demonstrated to outperform traditional educational models for students ranging from the elementary level to advanced placement courses. At Cajal Academy, we are building on this powerful framework to integrate our students’ therapeutic goals, as well as the academic content they need to understand the science behind them.

Each project brings our community together as well. Students attend ability-based core skills classes in reading, writing, math and science, and then bring these learnings back to our mixed age community, giving students of all ages the opportunity to contribute to a community effort.

Here is an overview of how we prepare our students for success in college and beyond through standards-driven, project-based learning:

Watch this video to get an overview from our co-founder and Head of School on how we integrate academic standards and expert therapies into multi-disciplinary project based learning:

Each cross-disciplinary project starts by identifying the academic content and skills to be covered, starting with the Next Generation Science Standards and Connecticut state standards. These are combined with the individualized therapeutic goals we have identified for each student. We then add to this the scientific content that each student needs to intellectually understand and contextualize both their differences, and how their therapeutic strategies work to address them.

From there, our team collaborates across academic and therapeutic areas to develop rigorous, real-world problems integrating these disparate areas in a truly cross-disciplinary way. These immersive project become unifying themes that are woven throughout all of our core content classes, including language arts, math, science, social studies, fine arts and even physio, social skills and social-emotional classes. Examining different facets of a problem through these multiple lenses build flexible and critical thinking and helps students learn to challenge their preconceptions and develop new perspectives. Students work together to design a course of study to answer a driving question that cannot be answered on Google, execute their plan and then manifest their learnings. Students are assessed at the conclusion of each project to measure their progress towards mastering the curricular content and standards presented in that unit, through a competency-based approach. This recognizes that student learning is not linear and underlines our emphasis on developing a growth mindset as we continue work to develop our “not yet skills.”

Students are given a driving question that require them to engage in critical thinking and analysis. Each project becomes a unifying theme that is woven throughout students’ core skills classes in math, science, language arts, social studies and the fine arts, providing purposeful, real world learning. This gives twice exceptional students the compelling reason they need to work through their fears and the challenges inherent to having the combination of outlying strengths and outlying weaknesses. This is particularly powerful for our high school learners, who have the opportunity to “try on” different professional disciplines and potential career paths as they work through real world engineering, scientific, literary, cultural and societal issues.

Collaborative projects provide an organic laboratory for building the social skills kids need to communicate their unique ways of seeing things and to collaborate effectively with others as part of a team—all essential skills for college and for the 21st century economy. Social skill support is integrated into the classroom, helping students to access and develop these skills in the environments and pursuits where they naturally arise. You can find out more about our personalized social-emotional learning programs here.

Rather than taking tests and quizzes, students manifest their learnings by creating products that require them to integrate, synthesize and build upon content from across multiple academic disciplines. These may range from creating a documentary to building a scale model of a roller coaster…and a whole lot more! This way of showing your learnings gives intellectually-curious kids the runway to look more deeply into areas they find interesting and develop their critical and creative thinking skills—part of our commitment to no ceiling learning for highly-gifted kids.

When we set out to create a new project, we start by identifying the appropriate learning standards, goals and objectives across our three primary domains:

• Next Generation Science Standards and next-step academic standards derived from common core

• Therapeutic goals, individualized for each child, including occupational, physical and social-emotional domains

• Human 101: our proprietary life sciences curriculum providing the scientific basis children need to understand how their learning, social-emotional and physiological experiences intersect, giving them agency to optimize their own regulation and outcomes.

These threads are integrated through deep collaboration among our therapeutic and academic instructors, with push in and co-taught classes being commonplace. For instance, students might building a 3D model to develop fine motor skills, our our psychologist might join a discussion on designing an alien creature for a sci fi movie in order to facilitate a perspective-taking discussion on how students might feel out of place in the world around them. For an example of how these threads pull together, read how our students are learning to make sci fi movies more realistic by leveraging math, environmental science, genetics, biomechanics, literature, animation software and visual arts, on our blog.

See examples of our project-based learning work, on our blog:

New to project-based learning?

Check out these videos to learn more about it: