About Pillars of Learning

I (Michael Weingarth) founded Pillars of Learning in 2009 to answer a very simple question:

“Why can’t standardized tests accurately predict the difference between difficulty and complexity from a student’s perspective?”

As I grew more experienced in the classroom, what I began to see was breakdowns between functional compensation patterns but had no language to accurately capture what I was seeing. Instead, I asked questions like: “Why can’t I predict what a student will find difficult more precisely and why can’t I predict when and how they’ll succeed?”

At the time, these questions led me to exhaustive research that bore little to no fruit until nearly three years later (2012), when neuropsychology helped explain a lot of the unique patterns I was seeing that traditional cognitive science could not. After years of digging into the intersection of cognition, perception, emotion, and brain function, I developed a proprietary framework around what I began to call “compensatory patterns of cognition.” The idea is simple: every student has a dynamic, adaptive response to content, context, and a whole range of other factors. That insight has become the bedrock of what makes us different. We work hard to help our tutors, students, and parents understand the relationship between behavior and how the brain actually works, because we’ve found that when students understand themselves better, they perform better, build real confidence, and become more resilient.

Pulling from years of research across neuroscience, psychology, and education, I developed a framework for connecting student error patterns to combinations of stimuli, processing, emotional state, and executive function. By 2015, that framework was producing dramatic improvements in test prep scores and academic performance for my small Connecticut-based company, gains we’ve maintained and built on ever since. In 2019, we partnered with Choate Rosemary Hall to provide test prep services to their Summer Programs Office, and we’ve served thousands of students since those early days.

What the best current brain science keeps confirming is something we’ve seen in practice for years: human beings don’t learn the way most learning programs assume. Learning isn’t a simple input-output process, and it isn’t so mysterious that it can’t be understood. It’s complex, adaptive, and deeply context-dependent. It shifts based on environment, emotional state, history, and a dozen other factors that most tutoring companies never think about. We do.

Our roots are in working with high-achieving students with recently diagnosed or as-yet-undiagnosed learning issues, as well as students with low self-confidence or profound test anxiety, but the methods we’ve developed work for everyone. I personally continue to find the work with neurodivergent students, gifted children, and kids who hate school fascinating, because every brain presents a unique set of responses to different contexts and demands. There’s no one-size-fits-all fix, and we don’t pretend there is.

My first group of tutors were fourth-year med students from Yale with very little free time, and they needed to get up to speed fast on cognition, memory, processing, trauma, implicit bias, and basic techniques for helping students work through procrastination and avoidance. That frantic push to build a real training foundation shaped everything that followed. We’ve always invested heavily in finding tutors who are curious, driven, and genuinely love helping kids figure themselves out. We don’t hire tutors just to deliver content. We hire people who want to understand how a student’s learning environment and history are either supporting them or getting in the way, and who know how to work with what’s actually there rather than force a prescribed approach onto a kid who needs something different.

If you’re interested in working with us, partnering, or just need help because your child has learning patterns that no one else seems to understand, feel free to reach out directly at Michael@pillarsoflearning.com.