An inclusive, nurturing environment in which innovative thinkers can develop their gifts, and the skills they’ll need to support them

Cajal Academy is an inclusive community for kids in grades K-12 who have very high analytical and creative reasoning. Our students represent a range of ages, personalities, journeys and needs—and yet, our powerful approach fosters a true community in which kids come to truly feel safe in sharing both their areas of struggle and those where they excel.

We are proud of the diversity within our student gifts. Our past and present students’ talents include rock musicians, animal behavioral scientists, engineers, powerful advocates, portrait artists, environmental conservationists, elite athletes, evocative authors, theoretical mathematicians and more. We reject the idea that all gifted thinkers are ‘bookworms’ who excel academically: we’ve got some students who fit that description and others who do not.

The one thing all of our students have in common is strong analytical and/or creative thinking skills—so we re-engineered all aspects of “school” from the ground up to unlock and develop these students’ unique gifts. Scroll down to learn more about how this makes Cajal Academy’s gifted and special education program unique.

Students with strong intellectual gifts learn differently, and often can easily access skills that lead other students to struggle, while having unique struggles of their own. Learning through rote memory and drill can be not only unsatisfying but inaccessible, while accessing curriculum through their strong analytical reasoning skills leads to greater depth, retention and creative insights. In order to continue developing these gifts, they require academic opportunities that require them to exercise these analytical skills, within a supportive environment where it’s safe to take the learning risks required to grow.

Our team of experienced educators and expert therapists re-examined all aspects of education. We replaced the presumptions of how it has always been done with neuroscientific research showing us how children actually learn academically and socially, and we cross-referenced that against what the literature and our own experiences tell us about intellectually-gifted kids and the adults they become. The result is a whole new approach to education that is aligned to the science, within a facility designed by an occupational therapist to maximize learning.

Here are some of the ways that our “gifted-all-the-time” educational program is supports common traits of gifted learners:

We reimagined school to empower gifted thinkers to chart their own futures, using today’s understandings of how kids learn, socialize and grow. Here are some of the ways that makes Cajal Academy unique:

Every aspect of our program is designed to nurture intellectual thinkers’ gifts

We set aside traditional expectations for how things are done at school and re-engineered it from the bottom up, using what neuroscientists know today about how the brain can change over time to better perform a given skill, how we can use connections between the body and the brain to re-regulate ourselves and how we can bring these things together to propel academic and personal growth. The result is a very different day to day experience, with morning reconnection through sensory activities, movement integrated into the classroom to accelerate academic learning, coaching in how to develop one’s own growth mindset and skills for learning how to self-monitor, self-manage and self-advocate for even the most complex neurophysiologic and learning needs. Highly-individualized programs come together through project-based learning, helping students learn how to engage deeply even when the topic of learning is outside their own personal interest areas: a critical skill for college and beyond. Attend an Information Session & Tour to come learn about what the day-to-day looks like at Cajal and whether it might be a good fit for your child.

Check out our slideshow to see how these elements come together.