If you’ve watched your child come home from school convinced they’re “not smart” despite their creative problem-solving and quick wit, you know the frustration of systems that don’t see the whole picture. You’re not imagining the disconnect between what you see in your child and what traditional assessments measure. That instinct driving you to look beyond labels and find approaches that recognize your child’s potential is exactly what’s motivating a groundbreaking partnership between UConn and Connecticut’s Forman School.
University and School Forge Research Alliance
Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Kristin Simmers has stepped into what she calls her “dream job” as Forman School’s inaugural director of cognition and learning. The newly created position bridges UConn’s research capabilities with the nearly 100-year-old Litchfield boarding and day school’s mission to serve approximately 200 students developing reading, focus, and executive function skills.
The partnership developed alongside UConn Waterbury’s Neurovariability Initiative, launched in spring 2025 by campus dean Fumiko Hoeft and engineering professor Arash Zaghi. Both Hoeft and Zaghi identify as individuals who developed different learning patterns—and both are parents navigating similar experiences with their own children.
“Forman is a school that serves students with learning differences, but also explicitly teaches them how their brains actually work and learn,” Simmers explains. “That’s been a passion of mine for over 20 years now.”
What if schools stopped seeing learning differences as deficits? UConn's Neurovariability Initiative is designing education around cognitive strengths instead.
Shifting From Deficits to Strengths
The Neurovariability Initiative represents a fundamental shift in how educational institutions approach cognitive differences. Rather than emphasizing challenges or diagnostic labels, the initiative recognizes natural variations in how students think and learn—designing systems that amplify strengths and remove barriers. This approach aligns with growing research showing that brains that process information differently often excel in pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, and creative problem-solving.
“Our goal is to cultivate an environment where every student’s potential can be maximized—regardless of how they process information,” Hoeft states. “This is about unlocking talent that’s often overlooked—not by lowering the bar, but by rethinking how success is defined, supported, and scaled,” adds Zaghi.
Many Forman students arrive having experienced negative educational encounters and were sometimes discouraged from pursuing higher education. The school works to rebuild both academic skills and confidence through approaches that recognize each student’s unique learning profile.
When people would ask me what I wanted to do after my Ph.D., I would describe this job and then quickly say, ‘But those jobs don’t exist.’|Kristin Simmers, Director of Cognition and Learning at Forman School
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
Research Opportunities Benefit Both Institutions
The partnership creates unique advantages for researchers studying how brains develop learning skills. Forman’s residential population allows observation across multiple settings—classrooms, athletics, evening study groups, and social activities—generating behavioral data currently unavailable in academic literature. This understanding of how the brain changes through targeted intervention can inform both research and practical classroom strategies.
Both Hoeft and Zaghi now serve on Forman’s inaugural Research Advisory Board. The collaboration includes student exchanges: Forman students attend UConn Waterbury’s annual WISHfest and participated in Dyslexia Awareness Month events in October. Early College Experience courses provide Forman students with dual UConn credit opportunities.
Forman also maintains partnerships with Stanford University’s ROAR (Rapid Online Assessment of Reading) project and Harvard Innovation Labs on educational instruction applications, placing the school at the intersection of cutting-edge learning science.
Key takeaways
- New director bridges research and practice: UConn Ph.D. candidate Kristin Simmers became Forman School's first director of cognition and learning, connecting university research with practical support for students developing reading and focus skills.
- Initiative focuses on strengths over labels: The Neurovariability Initiative designs educational systems that amplify cognitive strengths rather than emphasizing diagnostic categories, creating environments where all students can succeed.
- Partnership creates unique research opportunities: Forman's residential setting allows researchers to observe students across multiple daily contexts, generating behavioral insights unavailable in typical academic studies.
Preparing Students for Rapidly Changing Futures
Simmers emphasizes that the partnership keeps pace with emerging educational realities. “Our job is to get our students ready for college, while keeping a finger on the pulse of what college is going to look like for these students, which is changing quickly with AI,” she notes. The school opened a new cognition and learning building in 2025 with a diagnostic center designed to identify individual learning patterns and strengths.
For families seeking approaches that build on their child’s capabilities rather than focusing solely on challenges, this partnership demonstrates what becomes possible when institutions prioritize understanding how individual brains learn. The collaboration models a future where educational systems adapt to learners rather than expecting all learners to adapt to rigid systems.
Head of School Amy Clemons describes the institutional shift: “We have to be out in the world participating with what’s going on as much as we’re doing what’s right for our students here.”
Our goal is to cultivate an environment where every student’s potential can be maximized—regardless of how they process information.|Fumiko Hoeft, UConn Waterbury Campus Dean
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
Every child deserves an educational system that sees their potential, not just their struggles. This partnership demonstrates what becomes possible when institutions stop trying to fit different learners into rigid boxes and instead build environments that recognize cognitive diversity as an asset. For too long, the system has labeled children rather than developed them—managing differences rather than building on strengths. If you’re ready to stop waiting for schools to change and start building your child’s capabilities now, the Learning Success All Access Program offers a free trial that includes a personalized Action Plan—and you keep that plan even if you decide it’s not the right fit.
See what All Access gives your child
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You describe what you see at home. We turn it into a plan you start this week.
- Answer 5 short questionnaires about what you already notice, 30–45 minutes at your own kitchen table
- Your child sits no test and gets no score: nothing to schedule, nothing for them to dread
- You do the answering, the AI does the writing, and a person reviews it before it reaches you
- Access all 40+ courses instantly: reading, math, focus, processing and more, with new ones added regularly
Why we use AI, plainly: it writes from a knowledge base our team maintains and audits. We work through it line by line and pull anything the evidence stops supporting. The roadmap you get on Tuesday reflects what we corrected on Monday, and a human still reads it before you do.
Your school district must evaluate your child free of charge if you ask in writing, whatever your income and whatever the outcome (US, 34 CFR 300.111 and 300.301(b)). That route takes time and answers a different question than you do. This one starts today, from what you already know.
Your answers stay yours. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not hand identifiable assessment data to outside AI companies to train their models.
A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations (an IEP or 504 plan), or you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause, pursue a professional evaluation too. That is the only route to those supports.
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