Our mission is to empower kids to optimize their own learning, social and emotional outcomes

Cajal Academy was born out of one mom’s journey to find a school where her children could learn how to manage and overcome the obstacles holding them back, so they would be prepared to pursuit futures appropriate to their intellectual and creative gifts, without being limited to ones that could accommodate their challenges. One special education school after another told her that her children were too bright, too complicated or too unique.

Turning to her kids’ community-based occupational and physical therapy team, they soon realized that well-established neuroscientific advances point the way to do just that, but that these insights had yet to be operationalized in the classroom. Insights that could move beyond teaching academic coursework or learning how to “get along” in a world engineered for their mainstream peers to meaningfully reduce their challenges, and gain agency over those that were left.

Together, they founded Cajal Academy in 2019 as a non-profit organization with a mission to empower kids to optimize their own learning, social and emotional outcomes. This mission goes beyond rigorous academic instruction (though we do that too), to increase their access to the skills required for learning itself — specifically,

• identifying and then reducing the obstacles that threaten to hold them back, by building up the neural networks they need to provide them;

• equipping students with strategies they can use to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for their needs; and

• teaching students the neuroscience behind it all, so they can make informed decisions about how to proactively tackle any new challenges that may arise, within or outside of school.

A School and an Engine for Educational Innovation

Every element of Cajal Academy’s program was designed by our expert, multi-disciplinary team of clinicians. We’ve taken the walls down between different ‘related services’ and brought that expertise into the core of our classroom and social experiences. In the process, we unleashed our experts to redesign every element of curriculum delivery and school design to leverage modern neuroscientific research into the ways that children’s bodies and brains together influence their life-lived experiences, and how these intersections can be used to improve their learning, social and emotional outcomes. The result is a ground-breaking pedagogy that uses children’s need to move as a powerful learning modality, while leveraging movement and games to build the finely-scaffolded neuro-cognitive capacity children need to perform low-lying skills, applying the principle of neuroplasticity.

We empower kids by helping them understand the ways that our hidden neurophysiology influences our learning and social-emotional experiences—and how they can use those connections to their advantage.

When we were growing up, school was understood as a place for educating our children: a place to learn about reading, writing, math, civics and science, and hopefully come to understand a little bit about the world around us and how to get along with the people we find in it.

Scientific advances made in the last 30 years to provide something more: strategies and insights that kids can use to optimize their access to the cognitive and social-emotional “machinery” they need for academic and social-emotional experiences.

That’s a profound shift in our understanding of humans as organisms, and provides a basis for going beyond educating children to actually empowering them to take charge of their own learning and social-emotional experiences—not just in school but across community and home settings, in college and in the professional world beyond.

Cajal Academy is proud to be at the forefront of that work. Steven Mattis, PhD, A.B.P.P., our Director of Programs, has been recognized as one of the founding fathers of modern neuropsychology, and continues to drive the field forward with his original research into the ways in which hidden neurophysiological events such as autonomic regulatory disorders can drive learning and even psychiatric outcomes. Bringing this science together with strategies utilized for decades in occupational therapy settings, we have developed protocols that have already brought transformative results for students within our program who have a disparate range of profiles, strengths and challenges.

Adding a neurophysiological foundation under our understanding of how children learn, socialize and grow

Traditional educational practices and teacher training are premised on a psychological model of education. Academic and behavioral student success or failure interpreted through the lens of student motivation and intent. The trauma-informed schools movement builds on this model, recognizing that children cannot learn until they feel safe—and that strong teacher connections are essential to helping them do so.

Over time, as the field of neuropsychology evolved, researchers like our own Dr. Steven Mattis recognized that there were connections between the human brain on the one hand, and learning and behavior on the other. Individual neurocognitive skills were identified, and what are by now well-normed neuropsychological tests were developed to assess them. Institutions like Winston Preparatory School developed new educational programs differentiated not just on a child’s ability level but based on the relative strengths and weaknesses revealed in their neuropsychological profile.

Cajal Academy takes this understanding to a next level, by integrating into it the most recent generation of neuroscientific research, which reveal how our physical and cognitive or emotional states interoperate in real time—insights that we can use to give children agency over those connections and use them to optimize their own experiences. Beginning with the development of the functional MRI machine in the 1990s, scientists learned that our brain dynamically “rewires” itself to allocate resources away from networks required to do things we no longer do, and towards the tasks we commonly employ. Recent research in the field of “embodied cognition” goes further, indicating that we can accelerate learning retention and engagement when we pair it with motor and sensory input, increasing the brain centers engaged in the learning task. Meanwhile, researchers studying various autonomic nervous system functions that are essential to human survival have found that these and other hidden neurophysiological events can directly impair our access to the neurocogntive skills and/or emotional regulation required for learning and social activities. As a recent report published by the National Academy of Sciences recognizes, these connections are also important to understanding the learning impacts of seemingly unrelated medical conditions like Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and other connective tissue disorders.

Connecting the dots for a whole new educational approach.

In February of 2019, Cajal Academy, Inc. began working to develop a new educational framework leveraging these insights through new pedagogies and approaches that could be used to give even our most complex learners agency over their learning and social-emotional experiences.

Named after the 19th century scientist and artist who’s credited with discovering the basis of the human nervous system, Cajal Academy’s approach has been guided by the simple principle that educational environments should follow current neuroscientific understandings of how children learn, socialize and grow, including in particular how interactions between our physical and cognitive and/or psychological experiences influence one another.

Following the science, we developed new protocols and approaches that can flexibly be applied across a diverse mix of educational, neurophysiological and social-emotional profiles. The core of this framework includes:

• executive function and social collaboration instruction embedded into standards-aligned academics through multi-disciplinary deep dives to solve real world problems, with instruction differentiated according to children’s cross-cutting neurocognitive strengths and needs;

• movement-enriched, “Body-Informed Learning” combining the benefits of embodied cognition and embedded sensory integration therapy to simultaneously increase children’s academic retention and engagement, their organization and self-regulation skills;

• new special education Neuroplasticity Interventions that close the gaps in students’ neuropsychological profiles by increasing their neural capacity to perform low-lying skills;

• a new, “Trauma- and Neuro-Informed Approach” with integrated self-regulation coaching to empower children to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for dysregulating factors including prior academic trauma, chronic medical conditions, sensory integration disorder and more; and

• an intentioned focus, integrated throughout all areas of the program, on fostering an authentic growth mindset, supported by our “Human 101” curriculum giving kids a deep understanding of the science behind their strengths, their differences and the “why” behind how each intervention works to address them.

It’s time for modern education to meet modern science.

Mainstream educational environments still largely follow the blueprint laid out in the industrial revolution to corral children so their parents could go to work in the factory. Students aligned in rows of desks are urged to “sit still and listen,” suppressing the urge to move while earnestly straining to absorb a litany of facts and figures to pass the next test.

Scientists know an awful lot more now than they did then about how all children learn, about the tremendous diversity of being human, and about how those two intersect. With the development of the functional MRI machine, they’ve been able to observe how movement and sensory input are actually powerful ways to increase academic learning. New studies reveal how certain hidden neurophysiological events can suddenly increase or derail a child’s availability for learning and socializing.

Meanwhile, the economy and the very fabric of society that today’s children will graduate into are fundamentally altered from the ones for which traditional educational environments were designed. After all, when’s the last time you relied on your memory for a key fact or figure when you’ve got a powerful computer sitting in your pocket?

To create truly inclusive educational environments, we must design for the edges.

Educational reformers argue that if we are to succeed in creating truly inclusive educational environments, that innovation work must start with students who are “on the edges.” When we start by creating frameworks that work for even our most complex learners, it’s easy to slot the needs of less complicated students into the middle—and exceedingly difficult to go the other way around.

We agree with this—and we’d add that this changed landscape of new neuro-scientific understandings on the one hand and a whole new economic and social fabric on the other should be the guiding principles that inform that design.

All students benefit when education is aligned with the way kids’ learn.

For complex learners, it’s essential.

As any parent with a child who has complex special needs can tell you, there is a lot that expert therapists in different fields know today that can really shine a spotlight on how kids learn. From neuropsychology to auditory processing and so much more, testing instruments and expert evaluators can quantify a child’s absolute and relative skills at an incredibly granular level.

And yet, we aren’t giving our teachers training and tools they can use to turn that data into differentiation, leaving them to rely on instinct or trial and error while simultaneously juggling the needs of all the other kids in the room. And we are asking them to do that within increasingly-mandated strictures that place postural and attentional demands on kids that often run counter to what scientists now know about how their bodies and brains interact during the learning process.

The further your learning profile is from the center, the more this differentiation matters—and the more unique your neuro-physiological makeup, the more that environment will hold you back. Thus, while aligning education to the way children work as humans just makes sense for all kids, it’s utterly essential if we are to help children with atypical developmental pathways meet their potential.

Our innovations work is made possible by our expert, multi-disciplinary team of diagnosticians and clinical therapists, spearheaded by our Director of Programs, Steven Mattis, PhD, ABPP. Dr. Mattis has been on the forefront of neuropsychological thinkings and research for as long as there has been a discipline of neuropsychology—in fact, he played a seminal role in the development of the field here in the U.S. Seeing the innovative ways that we were bringing together neuropsychological assessment data with well-established occupational therapy strategies for increasing children’s capacity to perform a given task, he became passionate about helping us realize on the potential of an educational environment in which the insights that he and his colleagues in research and academia continue to make can be put into action in real time to help kids. We are honored to have him “on the ground” working with the kids in our small school.