Student Profile

Carroll School focuses. Every student at Carroll is a talented, curious, and motivated child with language-based learning difficulties (dyslexia) that make some aspects of traditional school extremely challenging. We created a community around this learning profile and rally around the belief that “children with dyslexia tend to look at the world differently, and that makes the world a better place.”

But we don’t stop there. We delve into this learner and discover 454 unique variations of this profile. Carroll teachers and tutors are trained and dedicated to providing what each student most needs. How?

1. We identify each student’s cognitive and academic profile using careful assessments, classroom observations, and work samples.
2. We create small class groupings of remarkably similar types of learners and design curriculum that delivers focused instruction for each child.
3. We monitor student progress daily and adjust our instruction based on a student’s performance.

The result: a positive learning environment where the curriculum is driven by moving forward as fast as each student can go and as slowly as necessary to ensure mastery.

TutoriAL & Small Classes

Why does Carroll work for our students whereas other schools have not? It’s because we set up our classrooms and tutoring to provide exactly what children with dyslexia need - small group and individualized instruction. Overall, the school’s student to teacher ratio is 3:1. However, teaching children to master the challenges of the written word most often occurs in our 1:1 or small group tutorial.

By minimizing group sizes, our teachers and tutors are able to customize instruction so each student can master decoding, reading fluency, comprehension, written expression, and mathematics. Students receives individualized, multisensory, systematic Orton-Gillingham instruction designed specifically to deliver what she or he most needs to become a strong learner. This approach is reinforced throughout each day, in each classroom (from tutoring to math to science), as a child engages in content learning and project-based instruction.

Cognitive Intervention

Cognitive Development & Intervention is one of the best examples of how our school commits to help children become skilled, self-directed, organized, strategic, and successful students. At Carroll we talk a lot about the role of the teacher. We believe firmly that our job is to create better learners, not simply to move them through a prescribed curriculum.

Cognitive Intervention gets to the underlying “causes” of a child’s specific language-based learning challenge. Through a detailed examination of a child’s cognitive skills, we are able to understand some of the weaker brain systems that make learning to read so difficult. In our student population, for example, many of our bright children have significantly inadequate processing speeds, executive function skills, or working memory networks.

Armed with that information, our teachers engage children in classroom activities to address the underlying causes of their challenges. In effect, we build better brain circuits that promote more effective and efficient learning.

WATCH OUR ANIMATED VIDEO TO LEARN MORE ABOUT ... Cognitive Intervention

Teachers & Tutors

Research affirms that the number one factor in student success is the skill, tenacity, and mindset of the teacher. We take that to heart (and task!).

Carroll teachers are uniquely trained to meet the needs of our type of learner - children with language-based learning difficulties. They have to be; they need to succeed where others haven’t. The more Carroll educators understand about dyslexia and how the human brain learns, the more a child achieves.

We are able to provide the tools, support, and professional development opportunities that mobilize teachers and tutors to deliver to each student what he or she most needs. We hire faculty that share a mindset that all children have the ability to succeed and we train them in our own Hall Copacino Institute of Professional Study to ensure each student is moving in a positive direction and receiving effective skills, strategies, and positive self-concept. As such, your child learns that obstacles provide opportunities to become stronger and are inspired to think differently.

Social-Emotional WellBeing

We believe that academic growth and social-emotional learning go hand in hand.

Carroll is an environment that makes learning differently a completely normal and valued daily occurrence. This creates an ideal context for children to gain appreciation of their strengths and a safe place to work hard to improve areas of vulnerability. While we cannot enroll children whose primary school difficulty is based in emotional struggles, every bright child with a language-based learning difficulty is at risk for low self-concept, self-doubt, frustration, and anxiety. We take on these issues directly as a core component of our school.

Likewise, our program directly takes on the issues of learning differently as a social and emotional challenge. For example, every day begins and ends with small group work with a homeroom teacher (advisor) and specific curriculum addresses social and emotional well-being as part of our commitment to delivering what each child most needs.

Dyslexic ADVANTAGEs

Children with dyslexia often have prolific talents. Your child may be able to think in stories, reason in three dimensions, or see the big picture where others do not. He or she may also be highly creative, curious, or intuitive.

At Carroll School, we think of these as superpowers. We celebrate the dyslexic advantage and give your child the opportunity to embrace these strengths through engineering, drama, art, music, community service, outdoor adventures, and more.

In every classroom, tutoring space, and activity, we aim to show your child that dyslexia is a gift to share with the world.

A Complete School

Carroll is designed to provide a comprehensive independent school education that meets the unique needs of each of our students. Once a child enrolls at Carroll, she or he typically remains with us until high school. Our broad, flexible and customized program alongside a dynamic student culture makes Carroll the ideal setting to prepare children for high school and beyond.

Over the decades, Carroll has evolved from a program that offered a superb remedial program but limitations in other offerings to a complete school with strengths in many additional curricular and extracurricular areas. As such, we are preparing students for success after Carroll in a broad range of experiences.

In addition to addressing some significant gaps in reading, writing, and math, Carroll provides an enriched and broad program in content areas such as science and history, the arts, athletics and outdoor education, project-based learning, maker spaces and technology, leadership, and social justice activities.

Mission

Our updated mission for 2021 includes our ongoing commitment to diversity. It reads: Carroll School empowers children with language-based learning differences, such as dyslexia, to become academically skilled students who are strong self-advocates and confident lifelong learners. Carroll is an inclusive community committed to embracing diverse strengths, identities, and lived experiences in order to give each child what they most need to thrive.

How we approach this incredible task changes constantly. At the heart of every decision we make is the 442 students that come to Carroll. We strive to give each of them exactly what they need to become confident, happy, lifelong learners. They are what drives our choices for how we design curriculum, how we train our teachers, how we strengthen the brain, how we hire employees, what we fundraise for, and so much more.