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Realistic Expectations

Parents take their children to music lessons and place a great deal of trust in their children's music teacher. They want the teacher to instruct their children in music, but often do not know what that really means. We will talk about the different areas of music that students study, and then realistic expectations for students with learning disabilities (LD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), touching on the strategies that are needed to help visual-spatial students to excel in music; we will look at the teaching strategies in more depth in later articles.

Visual-Spatial Learners

Before we look at what is studied in music lessons, we will take a quick side track. Many LD students are picture thinkers, and visual thinking is the fount of both the giftedness and the learning issues. Visual-spatial learners can include students who have learning disabilities and/or ADD, or may also include students who do not have obvious dyslexic tendencies.

Music Lessons

What is involved in music lessons? There are several significant areas that are taught by music instructors, and some of the most important are: music notation, ear training and "by ear" instruction, instrumental technique, music theory, and interpretation and performance. Each teacher has his own teaching style and may emphasize one or the other area of learning with certain corresponding advantages and disadvantages in each style.

Most lesson materials that teachers will use are notation based, meaning that the student learns to read music notation first, then he learns all of his music pieces and music knowledge through the notation. The advantage to this approach is that music notation can help convey concepts of pitch and rhythm that can be critical to learning more advanced material later on. The disadvantage is that if the student struggles with the notation, then he is blocked from learning music at all. The good news is that there are ways around this, which we will talk about in the article Note Proficiency.

Many instructors teach by ear and rote memorization. The advantage to this approach is that it can get a student with a good ear playing right away. The disadvantage is that a student with a good ear can often play a piece after only one listening and will skip the entire process of reading. Here is an anecdote from the book Music and Dyslexia, "It was decided that I should have music … As I had a good ear I made progress and got through the whole of Book One of the exercises and simple tunes simply by copying the notes the teacher played on the piano. She had not enquired whether I could read music; she had just assumed I could, and I was far too inhibited to tell her I could not. One lesson into Book Two I played my first wrong note. 'What note is that?' She said. I made a wild guess - 'B'. 'No, of course not you stupid girl.' There ended my violin lessons" (Wood, p. 51). It is an irony that some of your most gifted students can be the most difficult to get to read music. The teacher has to be careful of how much and when to play for the student. It is generally a good idea to have the student make the first two or three attempts on her own, because this forces her to read the music. If she still struggles, the teacher can play for the student, having her focus on how it looks or sounds on the instrument when she plays the phrase verses how it looks or sounds on the instrument when the teacher plays it. It is also important to teach reading in conjunction with any "ear learning", because if a student's technique progresses too far beyond her reading ability, it can make the student frustrated when she does begin to learn to read and is playing at a lower level of difficulty, as can sometimes be the case with various eastern styles of teaching classical music.

Musical instrument lessons, by definition, will have to teach instrumental technique. Music notation is often fairly general. The basic notation will apply equally well to most instruments. Technique, though, will usually be instrument specific. In other words, notation will tell you when to play a particular note, whereas technique will show you what finger(s) to use, how to hold the pick or bow, how to lip a note, or how to sing with a supported tone. It is connected to teaching music notation, but is not synonymous with it.

Music theory is sometimes taught in instrumental lessons and sometimes is not. Music theory teaches the underlying concepts of how music is organized. In my experience, it is important to include elements of music theory in instrumental lessons, because it gives the student the larger structure which will help him to make sense of the music (remember that visual-spatial learners are big-picture people). The theory of intervals, scales, chords, and phrases can also be helpful for reading music by way of a psychological concept called chunking (more on chunking in the article Music Theory and Chunking). It is also helpful when visual-spatial students start to learn to improvise and compose, which is an area where LD students can sometimes shine.

Interpretation and performance are also important elements of the lessons. Interpretation is the point where music stops being an exercise, notes strung together, and starts to have emotional impact, and will often be emphasized when the student gets to more difficult material. Both interpretation and performance are areas where the visual-spatial thinker can potentially shine. Having said this, does this mean that visual-spatial students will be better at the emotional/intuitive aspects of music over the detail oriented elements such as we find in music notation? Though this can be true, it would be simplistic to give a blanket yes. Just as there are many different aspects of music that can be studied, so there are many different "talents" that students can excel in. Some will be great sight readers, and others will improvise well, or have a flair for composition, or music theory. Others will have a beautiful tone and light touch, or a really fast ear. Visual-spatial students may do well in any of these areas.

Realistic Expectations for LD Students

The task that your child struggles at, if any, will depend on what sensory stimulation makes him disorient. Ronald Davis, in The Gift of Dyslexia, describes disorientation: "It occurs when we are overwhelmed by stimuli or thought. It also occurs when the brain receives conflicting information from the different senses and attempts to correlate the information" (p. 15). Disorientation is the result of problems in perception. Dennis Coon defines perception as, "... the process of assembling sensations ('data' from the senses) into usable mental representations of the world... Perceptual organization may be thought of as a hypothesis held until evidence contradicts it. Perceptual organization shifts for ambiguous stimuli. Impossible figures resist stable organization altogether" (p. 129). Any mind will seek out shapes and patterns; the visually oriented mind even more so. The pattern recognition abilities of the picture thinker can make him prone to make errors in perception, i.e. disorientation, but can also allow him to see subtle patterns in data, in his surroundings, or in art - whether visual or aural - that a traditional learner might miss. Disorientation is similar to optical illusions in that it is the mind misperceiving the data flowing in from the senses. So here we have the two sides of the issue. The visual-spatial thinker can learn things incredibly quickly if she accurately perceives the subject she is learning, but if she does not perceive things accurately, if she disorients when looking at music symbols or at the instrument itself, that is when confusion sets in. It is not general intelligence that is the issue with dyslexics - dyslexia is not mental retardation - but rather perception, particularly disorientation. You never know what the student will have a problem with until the lessons actually start, but there are definite signs of what to watch for, and we will discuss these in the article Confusion.

Betty W. Atterbury, in her book Mainstreaming Exceptional Learners In Music, had this to say about some music teacher's expectations concerning their students with LD, "One researcher (Ansuini, 1979) surveyed teachers who had taught these exceptional students and reported that the most common competencies were patience, knowledge of the individual and the learning disorder, ability to accept little or no student progress, willingness to provide additional time, and the ability to form personal relationships with students" (p. 46).

I read this statement and immediately agreed with the need for patience, knowledge of the student, and building relationships, but little or no student progress is not acceptable. It is one thing to go at the student's pace and to be patient. It is another thing entirely to expect the student to lack progress. That is almost like saying that the music teacher should expect the student to fail. If that is the case, then we as music teachers are the ones failing our students. So the question is: how can your music teacher lead your LD child toward success in music?

The first step is to eliminate disorientation. Ronald Davis has two simple visualization exercises, called Orientation Counseling and the Alignment Procedure, which allows the visual thinker with dyslexic tendencies to quickly and easily stop disorientation. When oriented, the visual thinker will then be able to accurately perceive his surroundings - possibly for the first time in his life. My experience with Alignment has been extremely positive. It can bring dramatic results in terms of reducing a students' confusion. It can also cut in half the time required to gain proficiency in reading music. You or your music teacher can lead the student through Orientation Counseling or the Alignment Procedure by getting The Gift of Learning by Ronald Davis and following the scripts in chapters 8 - 12.

The second step is to use multisensory techniques to help make the notation and the music concrete. Multisensory means just what it sounds like, using the different senses to teach the material, such as kinesthetic body movement to teach rhythm and the steady beat, and touch to convey note distance and pitch direction on the page/instrument. Likewise, the teacher can draw pictures to convey the meaning of music symbols and expression marks, play for the student so he can hear and see the different articulations and dynamic shadings, and use visual imagination to enhance interpretation. It is critical to always name a symbol, define what it does (as concretely and visually as possible), and describe how it looks. Multisensory strategies can definitely help the student to comprehend the music better.

I have been working with these concepts for a long time, and I have had consistent success with them. An example can be seen in one of my ADD guitar students (with dyslexic tendencies) who started with me in October 2002. He is bright and creative. It has not always been easy for him, he has struggled with note accuracy and steady rhythm, but he has stuck with it and has been gaining mastery and has grown in his ability to improvise. Using multisensory strategies and the Alignment Procedure has been pivotal in helping him get to where he is. He plans to major in music in college next year in either music business or sound recording technology. Expect the best from your visual-spatial students, give them the tools to succeed, and they can amaze you in what they will accomplish.

References

Atterbury, Betty W. Mainstreaming Exceptional Learners in Music. Old Tappen: Prentice Hall-Allyn & Bacon, 1990.

Coon, Dennis. Introduction to Psychology: Exploration and Application. 4th ed. St. Paul: West, 1986.

Davis, Ronald D., and Eldon M. Braun. The Gift of Dyslexia. New York: Perigee, 1997.
---. The Gift of Learning. New York: Perigee, 2003.

Wood, Siw. "My Experience with the Problem of Reading Music." Music and Dyslexia: Opening New Doors. Ed. T.R. Miles and John Westcombe. London: Whurr, 2004. P. 51 and 52.

© 2006 Geoffrey Keith