We reduce and reverse behavioral difficulties by addressing the challenges that drive them, for sustainable short- and long-term behavioral growth

Human behavior is a complex and multi-variable process that is driven not just by psychological drivers and intents but by your range of neuropsychological skills and weaknesses, and your state of neurophysiologic regulation as of a given moment in time. These principles are at the center of our research-backed, Neuro- and Trauma-Informed Approach.

Cajal Academy is not a behavior management program. Rather, we sustainably reduce or even reverse behavioral challenges through a comprehensive, data-driven and trauma-informed approach to identifying and addressing the difficulties that drive those behaviors while empowering the child to understand and gain agency over their learning and social-emotional experiences. This multi-pronged approach has proven more successful and less costly than behavior management systems, with parents reporting changes at home often in as little as just a few weeks.

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Any time a child becomes dysregulated or engages in undesired behaviors, we approach the difficulty as an opportunity to partner with that child to better understand what problem they need our help to solve, and how we can sustainably move them forward with that difficulty, through our Neuro- and Trauma-Informed Approach.

This approach starts with the understanding that each learning and social task we perform requires that we recruit and deploy a shifting mix of “splinter skills” in concert that are necessary to perform that skill—like using visual perceptual skills to read non-verbal communications or using those same consequential thinking skills that are required to predict what’s going to happen next in a novel in order to predict the social consequences of one’s actions.

Further complicating things, the field of neuropsychology continues to identify additional ways that hidden neurophysiological events can undermine the neurophysiologic regulation required to access those neurocognitive skills in real time, 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.

Thus, not all behavior serves a psychological function, and indeed there are many instances where the child is not capable of having the presumed intent, because they lacked the neurocognitive skills and/or in-the-moment level of regulation required to do so. For example, a student who does not naturally pick up social patterns and thus the social rules that are relevant in a given social context cannot have “intended” to break those rules. Where this is the case, behavior management approaches will do nothing to deter the future behavior, and will instead only increase the child’s anxiety in this and similar social settings.

Unfortunately, the connections between children’s bodies and their behaviors are not yet well-integrated into our cultural understandings about children. From teachers to parenting, adults are taught that “behaviors” indicate our children’s intents, and respond to them accordingly. These social expectations are set based on what most children can easily do most of the time as of a given age, and consequences flow accordingly. In our example, well-meaning parents and caregivers are more likely to punish the child for “throwing a tantrum” or behaving in an “unexpected” manner than they are to hand over that ice pack.

Yet for kids whose neurological development is atypical, when we impose these behavioral expectations without training them in how to improve the neurological functioning required to meet those expectations in the moment, we instead risk shaming the child for their inability to meet those expectations. This does nothing to prepare them to better respond the next time, and in fact makes it even harder for them to act appropriately the next time, by entrenching triggers for a freeze, fight or flight reaction that physiologically impairs their decision-making capacity.

This is the starting point for our approach to social-emotional and behavioral curriculum at Cajal Academy. Rather than lean on the child to control aberrant impulses through a system of punishment and reward, we focus on understanding and therapeutically addressing the underlying emotional or physiological events that trigger those impulses in the first place.

Cajal Academy follows in the tradition of trauma-informed schools. This neuroscience-based approach recognizes that trauma has real short and long-term impacts on the functioning of a child’s brain. In the immediate moment, a child experiencing an event they perceive to be dangerous is thrown into a survivalist state of “freeze, fight or flight.” Physiologically, blood flow is redirected away from the reasoning, creative and learning parts of the brain and towards those parts of the body that are required to run and defend oneself. Before these children can resume normal learning or social functioning, they must therefore first be helped to regain a sense of safety. Long-term, the human brain adapts to trauma by becoming hypervigilant to the potential for danger, lowering the trigger point at which it will perceive that a given task or setting is unsafe. This leaves many students overly-sensitive to negative peer feedback, or (as is often the case in twice exceptional students) unwilling to engage in a given academic task unless they feel 150% confident that they will be successful.

We’ve added a missing foundational element to the Trauma-Informed Schools approach: the scientific reality that your ability to experience emotional safety requires that you be in a state of neurophysio regulation. Most children’s bodies naturally maintain themselves in a state of neurological regulation—but children with atypical neurological development need to make intentioned efforts to achieve and maintain regulation, managing challenges that their peers may never even have to think about. Integrating this neurophysiological expertise with the trauma-informed approach, we identify any hidden neurophysiologic triggers impairing a child’s regulation and develop personalized strategies they can use to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for these needs. These strategies are integrated into the child’s highly-individualized, Student Growth Catalyst, developing the visceral map and intellectual understandings the child needs to mitigate, interrupt and eventually proactively manage these regulatory needs.

We bring these principles together in real time, through a flowcharting process led by our Head of School provides in-real-time on any occasion when there is an interpersonal dispute, or when a child becomes dysregulated. This Growth Mindset and Agency Coaching models a process that the students can over time utilize independently to identify what had triggered their reactions, taking into account learning, psychological, trauma-driven and hidden physiological and sensory events. As they become more adept at this process, we begin coaching the child to distinguish between these autonomic reactions and their responses to those events. Over time, our educational goal is to interrupt this cycle and help the child understand that the moment of a reaction is also a moment of choice in which they can exercise agency over their behavioral responses. For students who struggle with social cognition deficits, we include in this process an analysis of how the child’s actions led to reactions from others, including both peers and adults. This intellectual understanding becomes a tool that helps them to engage their reasoning powers more quickly in future events.

Through repeated applications of this process, we are modelling for the child both the value and a process for monitoring one’s own state. Often, it will turn out that these triggers are not only idiosyncratic but invisible to the outside observer—but over time, they may become crystal clear to the child. By partnering with the child, we open communications with the one individual who has access to the data we need in order to figure out what problem they need our help to solve: the child. As they hone this skill, these revelations become like lights on a runway, showing our team where we can make the most positive impact on this child’s life-lived experience.

Our responses to student behaviors in the moment are but one part of our highly-personalized social-emotional learning programs. As is the case with academic learning, we break down social-emotional tasks into the specific “splinter skills” required to perform them, and then assess the child’s ability to perform those foundational skills that are necessary to perform each of those skills. We then target and enhance those skills in a research-backed way, through an individualized Student Growth Catalyst.

Kids with the combination of outlying strengths and outlying weaknesses experience unusually high rates of academic stress and even trauma. For these kids, the very experience of growing up with a highly-asynchronous profile can turn academic and social environments into treacherous landscapes to be negotiated, as activities bounce without warning from “boringly easy” to “impossibly hard,” all under the watchful eyes of their peers. Over time, 2e kids often become defiant, refusing to participate at all. All too often, they are written off as refusing to do “unpreferred tasks,” when in reality they are in a state of “freeze, fight or flight,” trying to avoid once again reliving their pattern of trauma.

Find out how we use a trauma-informed approach to help kids overcome these fears and take the academic risks that are required to grow.

We sustainably improving long-term behavioral health through research-backed programs closing the dysfunctional gaps in a child’s neuropsychological profile that act as internal trauma triggers in kids with asynchronous profiles

The very fact of having asynchronous neuropsychological profile as our cohort of students do puts them at risk for developing school-related trauma, and develop comprehensive Student Growth Catalysts reducing these gaps to address the long-term causes of 2e trauma.

We serve a complex cohort of students who are exceptionally bright, and have areas of learning, social-emotional or neurophysiologic special needs. For these students, the very fact of having these large gaps within their neuropsychological profile is itself an internal trigger for academic and/or socially-driven trauma. Depending on the specific skills that represent their relative weaknesses, this challenge may come to a head in a variety of behavioral profiles and at a range of ages.

As that occurs, it can have the same effect on the child’s brain as trauma for two reasons. First, because their asynchronous profiles leave them without the even neuropsychological skill development required to perform a range of academic and social-emotional skills at their intellectually-appropriate level. Second, because they have no lens with which to predict which tasks will call predominately for those skills where they excel, and which will predominately rely upon the ones where, in relative terms, they falter. Over time, these unpredictable experiences of failure have the same effects on the brain as trauma, leading the child to become more and more hypervigilant to the prospect of failure in the future — and thus more and more resistant to external task demands, as they seek to protect themselves from these potential experiences of failure, especially in front of peers.

How this differs from a consequentialist or ABA therapy approach

This process is meaningfully different from the ABA approaches followed in most mainstream schools today, especially as those systems are applied in “therapeutic schools” today. Traditional school discipline codes presume that children’s behaviors can be reliably be viewed as windows into the child’s intents, efforts to gain attention or even “character.” Under those approaches, children are rewarded for complying with behavioral standards, and consequences are meted out when those expectations are not met.

This can quickly turn into an “arms race” of ever-increasing incentives. As many parents and educators will tell you, a consequentialist approach of carrots and sticks is no match for a bright child who is digging in their heels to prevent another experience of failure. Many children (especially in the cohort we serve, whose identities often rely on perceptions of their intellectual strengths) experience that threat as an existential one—so the consequences of noncompliance have to be pretty severe before they can compete with the risk the child perceives in engaging in that task.

These systems also bear certain risks for children who have atypical neurological functioning, as they bear the inherent presumption that the child has a relatively stable and age-appropriate ability to comply with those standards in the moment, if only the child felt sufficiently motivated to do so. Yet for kids whose neurophysiology doesn’t work that way, these outcome-based systems can end up just rewarding the child for the days on which their bodies make it easy to comply, and punishing them for those days and times when their body doesn’t give them the resources they need to meet those expectations in the moment. And that in turn runs the very real risk of unintentionally shaming them for physical disabilities like sensory processing disorder, immunological reactions and other hidden medical events that they don’t even know how to monitor—let alone control.

At Cajal Academy, our focus is on giving students the tools they need to scientifically understand and then gain agency over the underlying emotional and neurophysiological processes that drive these aberrant impulses in the first place—rather than simply “upping the anty” on how well they are able to control those impulses. By teaching kids the science underlying these reactions, we help them come to understand their dysregulation as “just science,” providing an alternative narrative to the messages they have likely picked up in pop culture and prior school environments that they are “bad” or “too stupid to follow the rules.” This in turn is an essential step towards developing a positive personal identity that incorporates the reality that they must contend with neurophysiological differences that their peers may not—and to take pride in their emerging ability to do so.

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