In the fall of 2021, as I embarked on my first year as Head of School, a first grader — who was just starting at Carroll as well — caught my eye. He would arrive at school with a hoodie pulled firmly over his head, arms crossed, sullenly supplying one-word replies to my greetings. 

A few weeks ago, when I visited a fifth grade classroom, we had a very different exchange. His eyes bright, his hoodie down, he opened up his Chromebook to show me a story he had been working on, a creative twist on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. When the page loaded, the words “Chapter 12” popped out at me. Clearly, this was an ongoing endeavor of his, a passion project — one that he probably would not have imagined being able to tackle just five years ago.

Moments like this one challenge the way schools and society traditionally define progress and success for students with dyslexia.

Carroll is filled with stories of transformation. For nearly 60 years, we have demonstrated that immersing students in a dyslexia-affirming environment — one that focuses on uncovering students’ strengths and potential — leads to dramatic change.

But what I marvel at the most, and what keeps us profoundly engaged and committed, day in and day out, is that change isn’t limited to academics alone. With structured literacy interventions, reading, writing, and comprehension levels dramatically improve. However, focusing on short-term academic gains alone fails to capture the full scope of what students with dyslexia need from their education.

We have the privilege of changing life trajectories. Six decades’ worth of alumni — some of whom return to campus to share about their post-Carroll lives with parents and students — bear this out.

Reaching Beyond Grades: Social Emotional Learning

For all students, but particularly for students with learning differences, building social emotional skills — such as self-advocacy, independence, confidence, perseverance, resilience, and problem solving — is just as critical as academic intervention. They lay the groundwork for effective, durable learning in the classroom. What’s more, these emotional intelligence skills, as Founding Director of the Yale Child Study Center Marc Brackett, Ph.D. calls them, set the stage for long-term growth and lifelong success.

Social emotional skills reach far beyond reading levels and assessments to allow students to heal from previously traumatic academic experiences, acknowledge and understand themselves as learners, work through struggle, and realize their full potential.

At Carroll, these skills are not taught in isolation, they are intentionally embedded into daily classroom experiences and school culture.

Among the many ways we reinforce social emotional development is by talking openly with Carroll students about their unique learning styles and how the dyslexic brain functions. We teach them how to interpret their neuropsychological reports, their 504 plans, and their IEPs so, when they head off to high school and college or enter the work force, they know exactly what they need and how to ask for it.

Academic Progress and What Families Can Expect

One of the most important roles we play as educators is helping families understand what meaningful progress looks like, and how it unfolds over time. Growth for all learners is non-linear, but even more pronounced for students with learning differences. At Carroll, we follow the trajectory of student growth through the spikes, dips, and plateaus and adjust instruction accordingly.

We are often tempted to compare children, to try to make sense of their progress within the landscape of their age-level peers. However, our internal data, combined with decades of longitudinal outcomes, reinforces what research tells us: Growth for students with dyslexia is cumulative, not linear.

For instance, our youngest students in Grades 1-5 are working tremendously hard to close the learning gap as they progress from learning to read (Grades 1-2) to reading to learn (Grades 3-5). Not until students are well into middle school do they begin to consolidate skills and meet grade-level expectations. Late in middle school, they often exceed those expectations. So, while a hard-working child may show modest growth in the elementary years, the compounded effect over multiple years is profound.

For this reason, it’s so important to stay the course — the longer students walk the path at Carroll, the stronger and more embedded their growth becomes.

Measuring Meaningful Success

Recently, I emailed a Carroll alumnus, a student I knew from the early 2000s, when I was a teacher at the school. Now on the West Coast, he is a flourishing professional, working in the sustainability industry. I invited him to reconnect. He shared about his life after Carroll. His email closed with: “I’d do anything for a school that made it possible for my dreams to come true.” 

Stories like his are echoed again and again across our alumni community, reminding us that the most meaningful outcomes of education often reveal themselves years later. Gauging success by short-term academic gains and assessments overlooks the far-reaching, real-world readiness skills we know to be so critical in life.

As parents and educators, we must conceptualize learning outcomes to explicitly include social emotional competencies as core — not supplemental — measures of success. In tandem with purposeful academic interventions, these skills lead to enduring productivity and success, and embolden students to face challenges, tackle setbacks, contribute positively to society, and, perhaps even come back to where it all began to share their story and champion the students they once were.

That is the best possible outcome. That is how a school shapes not just a student’s academic path, but the trajectory of an entire life.