CT ABRSM
Written assignment 2
Music to our ears?
Instrumental teaching for pupils with special educational needs
Hilary Haworth
Learning
styles and recommendations
Visualising
music and motor memory
Introduction
There are several conditions that require special approaches in instrumental teaching, including visual impairment, dyspraxia, autistic spectrum disorders, and the gifted child. I have limited this report, however, to those conditions of which I have practical experience, concentrating on children with hearing impairment and dyslexia. In particular I have written about my work with two hearing impaired (HI) children, Rebecca and Toby, and with Ben, who while not statemented as dyslexic clearly has dyslexic tendencies affecting his abilities to read notation.
Despite much evidence that students with impaired hearing can produce good, even great music, some instrumental teachers are still reluctant to take them on (Hash,2003).
Only a tiny proportion of HI
people hear nothing at all (Darrow,1989; Darrow and Gfeller,1991).
In
While human speech is a system of highly complex, finely differentiated signals within a restricted range of frequencies, music is much more flexible, composed of sounds at a far greater variety of frequencies and producing more intense vibrations, and with personal and ambient amplification systems, much more scaleable. Many HI children have difficulty in distinguishing subtle differences between sounds in speech, but may respond quite normally to music. In short HI children are likely to be different in more ways than they are similar.
It is equally true that music professionals can be resistant to the challenge of the dyslexic child – or abandon the struggle with notation in favour of improvisation work or playing by ear. However as Oglethorpe (2006) notes, pressures to read language usually motivate the dyslexic child to overcome all obstacles. No Individual Education Plan (IEP) for these children suggests they learn the works of English literature by rote, so why should we wish to shrink the world of music for these children into what can be reproduced by ear?
Music: means to an end?
Earliest work with deaf
children using music concentrated on its powers to train the voice and
mind. Antonio Provolo
(1801-1842) was a Carmelite priest ‘called’ to teach deaf children to speak
with normal rhythm and intonation, and to sing (Shurman,1999).
A beautiful-voiced singer and musician himself, he taught deaf children to recognize the vibrations of musical notes and relate them to speech, to recognize lip shapes, understand and develop the action of lungs, breath and chest, and develop their memory skills. His focus is clear from the titles to his published works, among them “Ways to teach spiritual ideas to Born-deaf, by teaching them to sing”.
This notion of music as corrective training (spiritual, vocal and aural) occupies a place on a spectrum where today we would find Music Therapy and mainstream music education (Packer,2002).
Music Therapy for children with special needs is a large and growing concern, with several different approaches within it. Its key theorists and practitioners, for example Robbins and Robbins(1980), see musicality as inborn, a medium of outward expression and inward experience. Their research shows that as well as providing for bodily expression, music facilitates auditory training and expands possibilities for speech performances too. In this way music becomes a ‘tool’ to enliven auditory development sessions (Darrow,1989; MTABC,2006) and motivate HI learners to use residual hearing (Robbins and Robbins,1980).
My own concerns are with learning music as an end in itself as a very special form of communication open to these children – albeit with probable benefits of transference to other areas of life and learning:
On the success achieved in one activity and the confidence engendered by it, other successes…may be built
Dobbs,1966
Learning styles and recommendations
While every child must be taught as an individual, certain learning styles are more prevalent with HI children. Learners with a hearing impairment tend to be gifted visual-spatial learners, as sequencing skills are highly linked with audition. A visual-spatial learner learns holistically rather than step-by-step, processing in pictures more than words, and can be gifted without doing exceptionally well in school systems where sequential learning is the norm. From the point of view of instrumental teaching, this means that while the ‘mechanics’ of the construction of the scale may be difficult to grasp, the ‘colour’ of the key, and quite complex harmonic structures may not be. At the age of five Rebecca could describe the structure of a piece she had heard at school (in sonata form) in terms of ‘stripes’, drawing the piece in the air and pointing to each theme’s place in this imaginary structure as she sang it.
A ‘drill and practice’ approach does not necessarily work well – so the private music lesson can provide an escape from school practices for these children. To make sure that scale runs are developed, for example, I set themed composition tasks as homework (e.g. with the title ‘Snakes and ladders’) to a backing track in the desired key.
The challenge for teaching lies in introducing this type of more advanced, abstract, complex material at a faster pace while keeping instructions simple and routine. Many guidelines on teaching HI children insist on a step-by-step instruction style, where context is kept clear and structured. Such guidelines (AOS) focus on ‘getting through’ to the child, pushing at the jammed door of the child’s auditory processing skills. Other approaches are more about accessing and practising different, stronger processing skills.
One reason that children with communication disorders respond well to piano lessons is the fact that one-to-one teaching is many times easier for them than group learning or class discussion. The trick is to make the most of that advantageous situation and to provide access to higher-level concepts and problem-solving projects in terms that are easily interpreted by the child. The instruction style must not be allowed to limit the design of the tasks.
Table 1: Teachers’ ‘self-talk’ and
approaches to instruction.
|
Teacher A feels “This child finds sequential auditory processing difficult so I must….” |
Teacher B feels “This child is a gifted visual spatial learner, so I will…” |
|
Get the child’s full attention, establish eye contact, use her name. |
Grab attention with a strong visual – a ‘mood’ picture for the piece being learnt |
|
Reduce auditory and visual distractions |
Use visuals, drawings and gesture. |
|
Speak clearly with few words; repeat things word for word rather than paraphrasing |
Demonstrate the technique or style (my own and others’ performances) in a variety of ways |
|
Use one step instructions and work on one problem at a time (eg., “Play that part quietly……….now play it again, staccato as well this time”) |
Avoid the step-by-step approach entirely and describe the end result (e.g. “Think of an animal that is quiet – but light and bouncy – play like that.”) |
|
Write down new terms and practice tips |
Have student draw own representations |
|
Ask students to re-verbalise instructions (they might remember it better, and I will think they have understood) |
Allow students to draw their own representations of concepts (they will remember it better, and I might understand!). |
|
Keep a sense of routine in the lessons |
Centre lessons on themes to which all the work is linked: e.g. dance forms, compound time, minor keys |
|
Let my language encourage the use of all faculties in self-criticism: “How did that feel?” is just as valid as “How did that sound?” while working on touch, posture, co-ordination between the hands, or a new fingering |
|
|
Model my speech on the structures of British Sign Language (BSL) introducing subject/object earlier in the instruction so the context is immediately clear. (Easier and more natural to do than it is to describe) |
|
The important thing when teaching the dyslexic student is again to teach ‘multisensorily’ (Oglethorpe,2002) with adaptability, imagination and an interest in the learner. For dyslexia, current advice is with the student to produce visual maps of pieces, involving colour overlays for repeated sections, and images for key climaxes which are meaningful to the learner (Carver,2006). For me however the visual patterns are the ones to use most sparingly, in favour of kinaesthetic practice and singing.
I have been able to use colour
coding to good effect with Ben, but Brain Gym and listening games achieve
more. We have also started to experiment
with a stave marked out on the floor and moving around on it, and are using a
lot of singing. However, Ben is also very literal, so using tactile aids such
as small lengths of string for quavers and longer lengths for semibreves
(Oglethorpe,2006) might send him into a tailspin of confusion. He himself wants to ‘unlock’ notation since
difficulties with short-term memory mean that while he gets many rewards from
playing by ear, he cannot easily build on this work over time or put up a store
of repertoire by this means.
Visualising music and motor memory
The importance of the piano
keyboard for HI learners in providing a visual representation of sounds -
visual analogues to pitch, semitones, octave etc - should not be
underestimated. As Diane Merchant, Music
Director at
Students do not have to correctly produce a pitch – the instrument does it; and the correct keys can be seen and felt”
Walczyk,1993
Just as Provolo trained his students out off monotone speech, Walczyk notes, in an essay on improving access to the secondary curriculum for the hearing impaired, that speech therapists have used keyboards to trace out the peaks and troughs of spoken speech.
This design feature of the piano is not always helpful to dyslexic learners. Ben’s confusion over visual representations of high and low sounds on the stave is not eased by adding the demand to translate that into right and left on the keyboard. He struggles to see the visual landmark patterns of black key “twins and triplets” as his super-literal interpretations of the evidence of
his eyes
forces him to notice him the two in the three.
As our attempts to ‘draw’ the rise and fall of the melody foundered, I
discovered that repeated notes, even without stave lines H H H were being read as rising or falling
patterns
.
As Oglethorpe(2002) notes, the processing of sound and sight are often equally problematic for the dyslexic learner. There is often a ‘left ear dominance’, relating to right brain functions, including pitch, and a weakness for left brain functions such as rhythm.
In Ben’s case he probably retains aural pitch information rather longer than the average learner; when playing by ear he seems to have no need to retreat to the start of a piece or a phrase to recover after a wrong note. Instead he simply experiments until he finds the correct ones and continues from that point. (I could only work out that this was what he was doing from listening to a recording of it –I rather needed him to restart in order to make sense of what he was playing!)
One key to unlocking notation for dyslexic learners may lie in developing motor memory techniques as I have been doing with my HI students. In a highly scientific article, Godøy (2003) shows how our experience of making and listening music involves sound, vision and action – it is cross-modal:
Any sound can be understood as included in an action trajectory
(Godøy, 2003)
We all mentally imitate sound-producing actions when we listen to music, and HI people often do this in reverse – translating from visual images to sound – with great effectiveness. The touch of my HI students is improved after they have spent time looking at the strings being struck while they modulate their actions at the keyboard. There are ICT packages designed to portray sound visually, but a computerized graphic is not going to trigger these ‘motor-mimetic’ responses as effectively – it is like trying to lip-read a cartoon character as opposed to a human being in the same room. The acoustic piano, its casework full of inefficient vibrations and its keys responsive to subtle differences of touch, gives back much more information to the hearing impaired learner about the nature of the sounds s/he is producing than an electronic keyboard without enhancement.
The motor-mimetic area can help dyslexic learners too. Exaggerated finger and arm movements help recall fingerings better than numbers on a score, and those landmark black notes can be felt ‘blind’ - and are better remembered afterwards.
Conclusion
There are many ways in which the teaching process can be adapted to reach special needs learners. However, in essence, the needs of HI or dyslexic students are the same as for any other – “good teaching, consistent practice and positive support” (Hash,2003). And while some instruments may have advantages over others, an intrinsic motivation to play the piano will outweigh any of the usefulness of having the strings close to the ear on the harp, say, or playing at a low register on the tenor sax.
For these special needs children it has been useful to start learning piano during Key Stage 2, since this gives a headstart in the increasingly keyboard-based school curriculum at Key Stage 3. Piano duet work is particularly suited to HI children – the students I work with who have senso-neural deafness both hear better at lower frequencies so play their duet parts in the lower register – which also translates well into group work in secondary school music lessons.
All these elements will help provide special needs children with opportunities to perform at levels that surprise those close to them – and to celebrate successes.
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