Doulos Discovery School

Our mission is "Educating and equipping servant leaders through Christian discipleship and expeditionary learning to impact the Dominican Republic"

Core Values

-Dominican School: We are 88% Dominican students and 2/3 local employees. 

-Christian School

-Expeditionary Learning School:Expeditionary learning is a hands-on approach that teaches students to problem solve in the real world. 

-Calling Prep:Student will be academically ready for college, but also have the skill set to succeed throughout their lives. 

-Mixed Socio-Economic: Each of our classes is split into 11 paying student and 11 scholarship students. We maintain this balance because we believe leaders come from all background. 

Doulos desires to raise up a generation of students who have character and critical thinking skills to impact and serve their communities. 

Kristen has the authority, capacity and skill set to oversee this project. Our school structure allows her to partner well with LEAP fellows. 

She is part of a four-person intervention team created to meet the needs of learners with certified diagnoses. This team provides support in a vareity of ways.  She brought the "Equipping Minds" program to our school and has developed cognitive therapies for over 70 students. She oversees 10 different intervention specialists. She completed the "Equipping Minds" level 1 training courses and is waiting for her final evaluation.

Kristen is crucial in the process of intervention at Doulos and is very passionate about meeting all students' needs. She has flexibility in her schedule and can oversee the project well. While she is involved in the day-to-day therapies, she can also block chunks of her day to work on this project.

Kristen was raised in a home that deeply values children with special needs and she developed a passion through her experiences with her this demographic of learner. She came to Doulos in 2019. She worked with our student body and noticed a huge gap. Some of our students needed more help than they were getting. She introduced "Ready Bodies, Learning Minds" which is a body movement program to help learners. In 2022, she discovered "Equipping Minds" which is a cognitive therapy program developed by Carol Brown in the US. Kristen launched a pilot in the spring of 2022 and as a school, we began a full-scale intervention program this year servicing 70 students. 

Professionally Kristen is more than prepared to take on this project. Kristen graduated college with a computer science and business degree. This allows her the ability to develop and maintain different data tracking systems. She also has her masters in adaptive curriculum and education psychology. She understands education. She is a master at managing her time and producing work. She loves learning and can make anything into a workable system. 

She currently oversees all data collection for our organization. She takes the data and assists leadership in explaining data to stakeholders. 

As listed above she has a very flexible schedule that allows her to block off work hours and be available to work on the LEAP Project. 

Additionally, we have multiple staff members who can join her in this project. We will have plenty of support and time to do this well. Our organizational chart is listed above. All the staff members listed are full-time staff. The school director is available to have weekly meetings, help with data collection, brainstorm and support Kristen as she takes on this new project and provide any additional support she may need to do this well. Intervention assistants can help with data collection and any other tasks that may come up throughout the 12 week sprint. Kristen will be well supported by the Doulos staff. 

Our Intervention program allows at-risk learners to repair, develop and improve brain function through interactive, relational games.

Our student body consists of 311 students and currently over 20% have a legal learning or social emotional diagnosis. When children do not get the proper support by grade 3 students are statistically less likely to ever achieve grade level learning. The gap between on level students and students below level due to the lack of support continues to expand. This group of students quickly determine that learning is not for them which impacts their ability to be successful in the future. 

We live in a country that lacks the resources and education to help this population reach their full potential. Outside of our organization, there are no options for students with special needs. Currently, we live in a town with a population of 70,000 and they have space for 25 students in their special education program. This program isn't set up to develop students. Their main goal is to provide a safe location for them to spend their days allowing parents to work. We have a desire to provide more than just a safe location. We believe that they have the potential to be leaders.

We want to develop a LOW-COST, EASY TO IMPLEMENT robust program that can be replicated in any school setting to support special needs students' development allowing them to improve their educational outcomes and reach their full potential. 

In order to get the Ministry of Education's attention and approval for scale-up, we must first show that our strategies work. We have seen great improvement in our students who are part of the program and so have others who implement "Equipping Minds" in other countries, however, there are no formal studies that prove that cognitive therapy impacts thier academic outcomes. Research has been done in the United States, but there are often no control groups and several other factors that impact the results. We are creating a program that is providing the basics of "Equipping Minds" in order to have a program that is replicable in any Latin American school no matter their economic status. We are utilizing card games, and puzzle to provide cognitive therapy to at risk children in order to stimulate their brain in a way that impacts the whole child.  There has yet to be studies done using only the cards and puzzles and/or bilingual learners outside of the United States. 

We need help designing a study to show the effectiveness of the program and developing an implementation protocol that is complete and easy to follow in order to help replicate and scale up this solution in the country. We know our cognitive therapies work, but don't have the data to prove it. We need help developing a research model that can be used to verify our work. 

"Equipping Minds' primary mission is to work with children and adults to increase their cognitive abilities and decrease learning, emotional, and social challenges. They see working memory, processing speed, attention, comprehension, executive functioning, critical thinking, visual-spatial reasoning, social skills, self-regulation, and communication skills increase to help them overcome learning, emotional, and social challenges by equipping their minds to reach the full potential God has for them. Dr. Reuven Feuerstein has proven that “everyone- regardless of age, etiology or disability- has the immeasurable ability to enhance their learning aptitude and heighten their intelligence.”"(Brown)

Utilizing the program "Equipping Minds", we provide cognitive therapy for thirty minutes a day through different games and activities. Each activity is modified to meet the learner's needs. Students work with a trusted adult to play different games that require different higher-functioning skills. One example is a color sort using Uno cards. The students must sort the cards by color saying"Green on Green or Red on Red." How does this work? The students are being forced to do three things at once. Their brain must physically move the card, their eyes must track the card and their mouths must verbalize the card. This multi-step processing being done simultaneously forces new brain waves to be created.

Another game is memory sort. Students must hold the Uno cards in a pile. The student looks at the first card and says the number and places it down. Then the student looks at the next card and says the number. The student continues to go back and forth. As the students progress, the complexity progresses. Each game has 20-30  different steps. These steps continue to heal the brain. These games repair the missing connections or build new connections. 

The program desires to repair and develop neurological connections to allow the student to think. As students' brains are healthier, they can function at a higher academic level. 

We are providing this cognitive therapy at different points throughout the day based on the students' needs and levels. We have many students that come first thing in the morning from 7:30 to 8:05 and our younger students are pulled during the school day in order to limit their additional time at school. Our intervention team works with groups of 3 to 4 students at a time providing support with the games as well as creating trusted relationships that allow the students to feel safe and known. This format allows our students to receive cognitive therapy as well as building trusted relationships with their peers and the adults working with them. We are tracking data every 3 weeks with DIBELS ORF to watch the impact it has on their reading fluency. We have asked parents to partner with us in the journey by limiting screen time, eliminating or reducing their sugar and artificial dyes, and setting a healthy nightly routine. 

Brown, Carol. “Meet Us.” Equipping Minds, https://equippingminds.com/educational-specialist/. Accessed 1 May 2024.

Currently we have conducted formative research in the form of standardized testing. As students begin the first six weeks of therapy, we test them using a variety of standardized tests. We test their ability to perform on standardized reading and math tests. We use NWEA MAP testing to see where our students are so that we can make adjustments to their learning based on their needs. We also use DIBELS to track their progress in reading fluency and comprehension. These test are done 3 times during the year for all students. Students that participated in cognitive therapy this semester were tested every 3 weeks in their reading fluency and at the end of their session they were tested again using NWEA MAP benchmark testing. We have selected these because they are what all students have been exposed to and we have the ability to track their progress prior to their cognitive therapy sessions. They are standardized, diagnostic, and used throughout the United States so we are able to trust in the fidelty of the testing. This testing allows us to verify that students are progressively growing while attending Doulos. 

Our testings have shown positive results. During our first testing cycle, all but 3 students grew significantly. The three that didn't were due to lack of commitment or faithfully attending therapy sessions. Here is our data collection from cycle one based on NWEA MAP benchmark testing. 

We know this program works, but we desire to have a higher quality and formal process for collecting and analyzing data. We need help developing the model. 

During the 2023-2024 school year we offered 4 six week session of cognative therapy. The therapy consisted of thirty minutes a day, five days a week. Students played different games created to develop certain higher functioning skills. 

Students are progress monitored. We saw growth during the first six weeks and continue to progress forward by inviting more students to participate. The majority of students grew in their reading fluency and NWEA MAP benchmark scores. This encouraged us to keep adding students and developing a plan to move forward in provide cognitive therapy at Doulos and within our community. We changed our model for lower elementary students and offered session integrated into their daily schedule. We also have limited the sessions to only mornings, because of the impact afternoon sessions had on our students and their desire to put in quality effort. We worked our way up to 70 students a day. Students who were previously struggling academically or behaviorally were succeeding. Here is a video our school produced to showcase the impact "Equipping Minds" has had on three specific students. 

Equipping Mind Impact

During the 2023-2024 school year we fully launched the "Equipping Minds" program. We have seen success in our students, but lack the knowledge to develop a research project that could be used to impact other areas in the Dominican Republic. We seek to establish an evidence based program that meets the needs of bilingual students who hold a certified diagnosis.  We need a plan on how we can collect data in a way that allows us to develop a set protocol to eventually share out with other schools in order to advance children's learning outcomes in all educational settings in the Dominican Republic.

Right now we believe what we are doing with students is working, but we need formalized proof. We need help developing a model on how to collect data and verify our data collection tools are meeting our needs. 

The reason that now is the right time is that we have done the therapy for a full year.  We have seen the impact and have made adjustments that fit our students and their needs. We have seen student change and now we need evidence to prove it. Cognitive therapy has never been proven to impact student learning. The reason is that no one has ever done a study where the only intervention students are getting is cognitive therapy. It has always been in combination with tutoring or another method. We believe that cognitive therapy is powerful and is impactful. We need the data to support our claim. 

If we can create a data collection model, then we can maintain the data tracking for a the next two years. Once we have a proven strategy, we can move forward. This will allow us to develop a protocol on how to implement this strategy into other school settings around the island.

How can Doulos collect data to prove that "Equipping Minds" has a positive impact on brain development?

What is the minimum amount of cognitive therapy neccessary to achieve above average academic growth?

Our desired outputs are a robust study design and accompanying data collection tools that will help us show the effectiveness of the program. 

Currently we use the following data collection structure. 

All students are tested using NWEA MAP testing three times a year. This is done in the areas of Spanish literacy, English literacy and Math computation. 

All student are tested using DIBELS reading test which shows their overall reading ability in English.

Both of these tests are standardized. 

If a student is in our intervention program, they are progress monitored every three weeks using a fluency test from DIBELS and every 6 weeks using NWEA MAP benchmark testing in English literacy and math computation.

Using these tools we have seen growth from the majority of our students. We would like help analyzing our data collection tools and determining if they are the best option to determine our success. We would like help developing a data collection plan that we can maintain for the following two school years and a formal way to analyze if what we are providing is impacting their growth.

Once we have a formalized plan that collects and analyzes data from both the control group and the group recieving cognitive therapy we will use it during the 2024-2025 school year to collect data from our special needs population. If our data shows the positive results we anticipate, we will then begin working on a implementation protocol that would allow us to go to the department of education and propose that schools implement this program during the 2025-2026 school year. During this two year period prior to proposing the program to the department of education we will be making adjustments that are needed in order to provide the most effective cognitive therapy program that is sustainable in the Dominican Republic. 

This protocol will involve a clear plan for schools to start "Equipping Minds". It will include the research behind the program, our personal data, student stories, and logical steps to start the program in any school setting as well as ways to collect and analyze their own data to make adjustments to meet the needs of their learners.

We will develop a professional presentation that can be replicated and used around the island to encourage local schools to meet the needs of their special needs population. 

Once we have our presentation and protocol developed, we will first meet with the Department of Education. We will offer to partner with them and train the local schools in Jarabacoa as a pilot program for the following two school years. Our desire is to continue the data collection with a different demographic of learners and bring this impactful program to any willing school in the Dominican Republic. 

We want to create, refine and upscale an evidence based program that analyzes and collects data that will allow us to develop and implement a protocol that any school in the Dominican Republic can utilize with their population of special needs children. Our desire is that all children with special learning needs can benefit from this program. In order for us to move forward in furthering the development of special needs students all over the island we must have a evidence based program that is sustainable for all schools to utilize. Once we have developed the tools, done the research, created the protocol we can meet with local school leaders. These meetings may resut in other schools implementing "Equipping Minds" and providing services to the underserved students with special needs.