we empower kids to understand and gain agency over their reactions through our exclusive, Neuro-and Trauma-Informed Approach

It is well established that repeated experiences of stress and other types of trauma rewire a child’s brain and impact their availability “in the moment” for learning, social and emotional experiences.

Neuropsychological research also reveals a myriad of hidden neurophysiological events that can have a similar effect on the brain, by throwing a child into a state of dysregulation in which they are unable to access their skills. These include sensory processing disorder, difficulties regulating core body temperature and more.

At Cajal Academy, we are building on the work of the trauma-informed schools movement by integrating it with scientific understandings about how neurophysiological differences and events inform children’s learning, social, emotional and behavioral experiences.

Here is an overview of our approach and the principles behind it:

Well-established research over the past thirty years have demonstrated that trauma has real and lasting impacts on the functioning of a child’s brain, both in the moment and long-term. 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. In essence, this state acts as a learning disability, as it fully (if temporarily) impairs the child’s ability to learn. Before these children can resume normal learning or social functioning, they must therefore first be helped to return to a state of calm.

In the longer term, research shows that the brains of children who experience trauma change in ways that make them hyper-vigilant to danger. This is true not just of classic traumas like experiencing personal violence but also for repeated experiences of stress, such as children with unaddressed learning needs may experience in classrooms—especially where those failures are apparent to their peers.

Over the past thirty years, a movement has emerged among school psychologists away from consequentialist behavioral systems and towards “trauma-informed” models for behavioral management. Under this approach, teachers and caregivers build close relationships with students, and put this relationship at the center of educational activities. Teachers respond in the moment to undesired behaviors by first reestablishing connection with the child and re-affirming that relationships, thus helping the child return to a feeling of physical and emotional safety. The caregiver then partners with the child to identify the event(s) triggering their survivalist reaction. It is only after the child is fully calm and able to process the event that consequences are provided for negative impacts their behavior has had on others—because it is only then that the child is in a place to learn from them.

When a child experiences a moment of dysregulation, we work with the child to identify what had triggered their reaction, taking into account not only prior emotional traumas and repeated adverse experiences but hidden physiological and sensory events as well.

As a child becomes more expert at this process, we begin coaching the child to distinguish between these autonomic reactions and their responses to those events. For instance, a child may have become anxious about a reading task and then thrown their book. It is only by validating the reaction of feeling anxious that we can help the child learn to control that anxiety and choose a response other than throwing the book. 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.

We do this by engaging our cohort’s superpowers: the high analytical reasoning skills that is one of our core admissions criteria. In the moment, we help students analytically dissect what may have been extremely fast-moving and emotional events by modelling for them how the events can be broken down into a series of cause and effects, using flowcharts. 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.

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.