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The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

May 20, 2014Music and More: Strategies for Success in Inclusion Classrooms

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LISA DAMICO: Hello everyone and welcome to Music and More: Strategies for Success in Inclusion Classrooms. I’m Lisa Damico, your moderator and Webinar organizer. Today’s Webinar is part of a monthly series that comes of the Office of VSA and Accessibility at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. This series addresses topics related to arts, disability, and education. If you would like to view live stream captioning of this Webinar, you can follow the link you see on this slide and in the chat box of the control panel located on the right side of your screen. We encourage you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as well as to tweet or post about today’s Webinar using #VSAWebinar. Before we get started, let’s take a moment to ensure that everyone is familiar with the GoToWebinar control panel that you should see on the right side of your screen. If you need to leave the Webinar early, you can exit out of the program by clicking on the X in the upper right corner. Make sure you that have selected telephone or mic and speakers to correspond with how you're connected to the Webinar. You have the ability to submit questions using the chat pane located near the bottom of the control panel or if you would prefer to say the question instead of typing it, you can click on the “raise your hand” icon on the control panel and I will unmute your microphone. I encourage you to chat amongst yourselves during the Webinar using the chat box. Your questions will come directly to me and during the designated question and answer time at the end of the presentation; I'll relay them to our presenters. You will type in your questions and they will come to me and I will play radio show host and relay them to our presenters. Following the presentation, there will be a follow up e-mail with a link to the recording of the presentation, a copy of the power point and the copy of the transcript. That means you don't have to worry about taking notes during the presentation. I would also like to let you know about no month's preparing, how to prepare for host an intern with a disability 3:00 a.m. Washington, D.C. time. Bethany is the group sales assistant manager where she hosted interns through our internship program. Laura is the director of the Williams town theater festival. And with that I will turn it over to Phil Alexander, the director of the New York State Alliance for Arts Education, who will introduce today’s presenters. Phil?

PHIL ALEXANDER: Thank you for coming to today's webinar. We will be exploring music but it may also apply to other arts learning.

As music is our key element of the discussion we are presenting a few other elements as part of the webinar. The audio quality is far from ideal so we will provide the score and the lyrics of the songs so you can follow along easier. Our webinar is structure into four parts. Following this introduction, we will review the educational theory behind our approaches and all of that the sections are color coded with red type. We'll also explode a few sample lessons that have color coding with blue type and we'll conclude with questions and answers from you our participants. Today's presenters are very experienced in qualified music educators. Dr. Elise Sobol has K-12 experience teaching from early childhood through high school in regular and special education settings. She serves on the music education faculties at NYU and Long Island University, while also teaching at the Nassau BOCES Department of Special Ed. Alan Núñez has worked as an administrator, evaluator and teaching artist with various Lincoln Center institutions, including City Opera, Juilliard and the New York Philharmonic. As founder of Boundless Learners formerly Boundless Percussion, Alan has worked in special-needs classrooms for more than a decade with NYC-based organizations like DreamYard, Arts Horizons and Marquis Studios. He has presented at National VSA conferences, Washington D.C. He is currently a Master Teaching Artist for Marquis Studios' Teaching Artist Training Institute. I'm now going turn things over to our first presenter.

ELISE SOBOL: Greetings friends of VSA/NYSAAE, my name is Dr. Elise Sobol and I am very happy that you could join us this afternoon in this webinar entitled Music and Beyond: Strategies for Successful Inclusion. I invite you to utilize the contact and resource lists at the end of the webinar. Today will just start our conversation. I have been privileged to teach both in general and special education settings from early childhood through to my current positions at the secondary and collegiate levels. In the early years of my career, VSA in cooperation with the National Association for Music Education came out with a video teacher education series entitled Music for All Children. In this teacher education program, four components were recommended as effective teaching strategies across the disabilities.

These components include modeling, demonstrating a desired behavior before expecting students to perform the behavior, presenting information in small steps present So you can reach those with limited attention span and those who learn at a limited pace. Music/arts activity by breaking it down to its components and then presenting the components one at a time, multi-modal/multi-sensory presentation teacher should present a single concept in a variety of ways, multimodal, and lesson to be delivered in minimum aural, visual, tactile, kinesthetic techniques, multisensory for maximum student learning and clues to facilitate recall present new learning in ways that assist the children in remembering the information. My years of practice have given me the My three-prong approach for successful inclusion is 1) teaching with universal design for learning by using universal signs, symbols, codes and colors learning is integrated across the curriculum areas. Instructional adaptations are developed on an individual basis according to a child's Individualized Education Program or 504. Here's a concrete example. We are family. That is five symbols in that. We are family. I point to the pentagon. That reinforces and supports the learning of phrase. The next line in this song, I have all my sisters with me. There is your octagon. It helps to go around the shape and for them to note each part of the language. So it is enhancing their language, too. If I want them to move to the right, I have my one-way sign. That is an example for teaching with universal design using signs, symbols and color, and codes.

The next part is teaching in a mediated learning environment. How do you affect success with your students? Teaching with relevance and meaning. M.L.E. is recommended by a late doctor and I will talk about him shortly. My third prong is using rhythmic toning properties. I learned that from Dr. Howard Gardner. The next slide is going to show a page out of my book. You see I used an upside stop light figure, red always signifies the lowest function, the root of a chord and following the words, please stand up. You have low, low, high, please sit down, please get in line, and great job. So high, low. Those are sound signals based on the way we speak. If you canvas many other languages you also get the same tonality for the same context of learning. So this theoretical framework, which I have developed my evidence based class work is from. The cognitive direction, by the late doctor and he gave 60 years of influence on showing that everyone

can learn. The brain is elastic and with patience and this mediation, even the most impaired or challenged individual can learn and improve his life condition. The third part is the blended mood sequencing program, which recommends rhythmic tapping of words to help struggling readers, spellers, and speakers. So consistency and strength comes from my belief in the positive and possible and inclusion is at its best when all students feel safe and secure. How do you get the materials to make a successful classroom? That is actually one of my fortes. I'm bringing you two song examples and the resources at the end of the webinar. A song that is inclusive reaches all different types of learners and their learning styles. It crosses cultural boundaries. It can be done with the nonverbal student or the verbal student. Here is we are community, a prime example of a strong, inclusive lesson. OK, I'm going to play it now. We are community is short, beautiful, marvelously strong, it can be used for secondary levels and it introduces all learners the importance of being part of the human family. Modeling the teacher can do the first part and the student cans echo the second part after the instrumental. After each phrase is introduced in small steps. Multisensory, the concept is we're all, we're reading, we're performing, we're singing. The fourth component is recall. How are we part of a community? We're one. What can we do for each other? We can help each other. If we need care, love can come from anywhere. So, again, if the child's nonverbal this song can be performed in sign language and the vocal La, La can be replaced. More on rep tour later in the webinar. Back to Dr. Alexander.

PHIL ALEXANDER: Thank you very much. I'm going to invite Alan Nunez and I was wonder if you had any thoughts about what you heard Elise talking about and the song "we are a community."

ALAN NUNEZ: Thank you very much. Elise, great to see you. I'm glad you went first because you led with a wonderful lesson for us. What I'm struck by is the complexity of that song. Yet the way it was broken down, very achievable. I just came -- I just got done teaching five kindergarten classes just now. I'm already thinking about how much we ask with that. I believe you had 16th notes in there and it seemed using those four components so congratulations on that. We will be chatting more about that song probably after the webinar. I do want to point out, I want to

reiterate the four components because the lesson I'm going to do now encompasses all four of those. Number one is modeling. Two, is introducing new information in small steps. You're going to see that we're going to be doing that in my lesson, literally. Now four is multimodal and number five is recall. We will play a game among ourselves. Raise your hand when you see modeling. I can't see your hands. We'll have a good time anyway.

My lesson has to do with the two big challenges that every music maker faces. It is tenfold for music educators. That is the dual aspects of dynamics, the loud and the soft. Of course, the tempo. The fast and the slow. These are wonderful concepts for children. These are the first dualities that are required of them. Lower your voice. Please walk slower. Come on, eat our cereal quicker. Speak up I can't hear you. These are par for the course for children. You ask a child about how fast and how slow and many will likely engage their whole body to show you. Loud and soft will generate as quickly a response but maybe it will just be with their voices. They will be loud. They will be soft. Now, there are the students of ours who cannot use their whole bodies to demonstrate and simply those who are not fully able to vocalized. In addition, the cognition required to process both these concepts and embody that are fairly great and can be big challenges as well. Now add to this complication that what comes from teaching the dualities is independence of each other. In typical adults a musician let's say. I've been playing for more than 30 years. We have always have to work to make sure the aspects of musicality are not linked in with each other. If you ask someone to sink softer they will sing slower, too. You speed up the pattern of the drum pattern and they find themselves getting louder. How do we help our students process this? Well, I found that so many of my students, almost without exception has a kinship and a fascination with animals. It is no wonder, as you can see, our literature is filled with references, talking bears and helpful dogs and farms with quacking ducks. For many of these students, the connections can be as or more powerful than the connections that they make with their human ears. She is an autism pioneer and a spokesperson. Her work in livestock design is amazing to witness. She used her unique perspective to create a more structure for animals. Using animals as metaphor has helped my teaching enormously. So to start off let's start with the easier concepts when we combine dynamics and tempo. Ask your

students to visual this animal, in this case is both fast and loud. Now, I happen to use a horse because there are so many references to them in written visual text. Horses are fast. Horses are last. Let's watch this video. He's booking it. Can we play it again? I ask my students to walk across the room like the animal and exaggerate the traits. This involves me walking with them so we really exaggerate for maximum understanding. I had the student do it by themselves. Once I feel like they have taken in the concept, I put an instrument in their hands and I repeat it having the instrument match it in volume and speed. Now a tambourine is wonderful for this. It can convey a wide sampling. Let's take a look at my next example. Again, this one is one of the easier ones. Like I said when people are asked to sing slower they get softer. This one I used a turtle. Please note the beauty of this approach is you can substitute any animal you think will help the student understand it fully. Let's take a look at my friend walking like a turtle. I have to tell you. I smile looking at this. This is my second grader named Joshua. He had such joy in his face just doing this simple thing. He knew this was going to be videotaped but he loved the thought of walking like a turtle. So let's go to the harder concepts because this is where -- by the way, have you seen modeling? Have you seen introducing new information in small steps literally? Have you seen multisensory presentation? Inclusive facilitate recall. I have the cards that you see there and that helps a lot. The ones that go counter of the expectations of the increase or decrease of either speed or volume. To get my kids to envision on how to play both fast and soft, I have them picture a mouse. There are many animals that fit this bill and this happens to be the one that I choose myself. Can we look at this one? Think about it. Have your kid think about does a mouse move fast? Can you catch it no, that would be hard. If he was not squeaking, would you hear him? No. That is a great example of an animal that is fast and soft.

We come to the last example. This is my favorite. This is the one where Mr. Alan gets exaggerated and dramatic. I leave it to the end because we have the most fun with. To get the concept of playing music loud and slow, I have the students move around like an elephant. Have them really stomp around as they are taking down trees in the jungle. Can we watch this video? I actually had to stop Joshua from doing. This. He was walking like

an elephant back to your classrooms. I was like, Joshua, you can go back regular speed. Envision how adapting this -- this can be adapted with kids with wheelchairs, incorporating their abilities in a variety of ways to achieve the desired effect. I'm never going to forget the student I had this winter who found the slowest stetting on her electric wheelchair and I have to tell you it was really, really slow using her horn for, in her case, for elephant sounds. Then her speech therapist thought o add the word elephant to her A.A.C. device and she was literally off to the races. Also, think about our students with autism react to this and how they would feel walking side by side either holding hands or not mimicking each other. This could be a welcome relief to students who sometimes find face-to-face encounters extremely painful. We teach face-to-face. Look at me. I'm speaking. This is a wonderful way for them to look at our feet and do this. Good luck with incorporating this. Our contact information is at the end of webinar. We have more to go but I say that because I really look forward to seeing if you incorporate this into your classroom, how you can enhance it and even what animals you suggest. So at this point, I believe will turn it back over to Elise.

ELISE SOBOL: Thank you, Alan. I was so excited listening to the joy in your voice getting the discoveries, experiencing the discoveries in the early childhood settings and with your students be able to participate and even make the video. I know our listeners are going to have great joy when they employ this in their classroom. So now I'm going to move a little bit ahead to the upper grades and building self-esteem and enforcing purposeful direction for each individual. It is a key point in not only selecting appropriate repertoire but stimulating lifelong learning. This is what we need to do. We need to teach functional skills in our classroom so they’ll be more independent when they leave the classroom. I mentioned the octagon and the eight counts which I always refer to. This is a picture that you're seeing of my Rosemary Kennedy High School Glee Club. They were privileged to sing for the National Association for Music Education’s music in their school's month. They were asked to sing the "Star Spangled Banner." This was outstanding for them since they all started their careers as nonverbal students. And now through song, their voices have emerged enough to be the first special education high school to sing Land of the Free,

Home of the Brave. That is a very exciting thing. They’re also very confidently singing the next rap, which I'm going to present to you. It is called "what is music?" It is an example on how we can infuse curriculum content and transfer that, our curriculum and grade level expectations through the music. So here we go, The Music Fact Rap by Sally Albrecht.

[The Music Fact Rap song plays.]

I certainly hope you enjoyed that and can see opportunities in the break of the rap to the dance your eight counts. A rap like this covers curriculum concepts. The musical genre itself stimulates wonderful creativity in all your students. If one of your students can't write a whole new rap, he can write a section of the rap and it can become a class composition. It strengthens ELA and basic counting skills. The contemporary style reaches a wide range of, spectrum of learners and it serves as a model for teaching and learning new curriculum materials. This again is from a collection called Schoolhouse Raps and just the instrumental background track can be used to cover integrated curriculum across the subject areas. We have some takeaways for you so I'm going turn the microphone over to Alan for the first part.

ALAN NUNEZ: So, some of the takeaways we felt we wanted you to have is number one, UDL, universal design to reach all learners. I hope you saw evidence in what we just did. Number two is one of my favorites because I saw it in both things that Elise presented and I certainly saw in what I presented and that is the effective teaching, including these four components: number one, modeling, number two, presenting information in small achievable steps. Number three, multimodal and multisensory presentation and number four clues to facilitate recall. The third takeaway we have is to be consistently adapting to each individual's needs. We have some more takeaways. Elise, do you think you can handle those?

ELISE SOBOL: That means differentiating instruction. The student does not have to be designated in special education for the need to differentiate instruction. So this universal design for learning with the four components lends itself to all learners and we mean all learners. The next takeaway is integrating music across the curriculum allows for successful social, emotional, and intellectual development. Actually, music integrated across

the curriculum helps students with or without disability succeed in all of their areas of social, emotional, and intellectual development. The content is most meaningful when the classroom experience relates to life experience outside the classroom. That is really important. Lessons that provide appropriate and enriching experience for students where learners are engaged through active participation are totally key for strategies for successful inclusion. So we hope we have stimulated your appetite a little bit. I know Lisa Damico is going to get on now and invite your questions.

LISA DAMICO: Thank you, Elise and Alan and I’m going to have you all type in any questions you’d like to ask Alan and Elise into the chat box and I will relay them and see what they have to say.

PHIL ALEXANDER: This is Phil. I think while we’re waiting for our first questions from the listeners. I wanted to see, Alan and Elise, if you wanted to think about or share with us ideas about how some of these strategies might apply in classrooms where you are not teaching music. Maybe where there is another art form, say theater or visual art or dance, or a classroom where they are exploring social studies or language or math.

ELISE SOBOL: I would be delighted to speak to it. In this schoolhouse raps collection, there is a social studies rap. Years ago my principal said that my NASSAU BOSCES classes, all the students at that time, I was teaching at the elementary level, they needed to pass their fourth grade social studies state exam. So I used this social studies rap, again it was a similar background track, but it had all of the information required for them to learn about the Constitution of the United States and the dates about our founding of our country and the fathers and the states and places and the House and the Senate and all sorts of information about the government and as God as my witness the students passed the exam. So through musical intervention, music assisted learning, curriculum content can be transferred. Another way we use this is whenever there is no words, that is a great opportunity for dance movement. Another way we used it was to actually turn it into a play. So the style of the rap can be used outside the music classroom, the ideas to just infuse music, which reaches all learners and is a whole brain intelligence, to

strengthen learning whatever that curriculum content is. Do you agree, Alan?

ALAN NUNEZ: Absolutely. I would like to chime in on something that a visual artist that I worked with at the Marquis Studios Teaching Artist Training Institute this summer. The way it is structured is we have a music instructor, a movement instructor and a visual arts instructor. I had a particularly wonderful bonding moment with the visual arts instructor who loved this particular lesson. She happened to sit in on the lesson when we were combining the dualities. She was talking to me how visual arts has the dualities as well. Light and dark. Take something like that and take something like thin and thick. So, think of the concept of drawing lines that are both thin and thick and light and dark. Maybe and some cases, some students can think that something thicker might be also darker because we think of the volume of something being thick and it be filled in, really filled in. Maybe you want to explore how something that is thicker as opposed to thinner can also be lighter in shade than darker. I actually look forward to hearing from you guys in the future on how you can apply some of these dualities in your artistic process. That is one thing I remembered a visual artist telling me that, wow, this applies directly to something I'm trying to teach my own kids.

ELISE SOBOL: I think it might be helpful, I have a nice list of principles that connect through music and performing arts, where there is art, music, dance, and theater. Simliar themes for connections and I think I can add it to the resource list to be helpful to everyone, foreground, background, high and low, dark and light, contrast. Yes, Phil, what a great question and I think we can be helpful to offer that to them.

LISA DAMICO: Alan, we had a few people who wanted to know about visual arts and I think you addressed those people's questions wonderfully. We also went a little bit in the direction of what strategies do you have for the instrumental music classroom or for music history? So we’re going a little bit down different paths.

ELISE SOBOL: Instrumental classroom, are we talking about traditional band program or string program or classroom

percussion? Can you be more specific? Can you ask the person who asked the question?

LISA DAMICO: She wrote yes, band or recorders.

ELISE SOBOL: Oh okay, alright, let’s say for recorders, I use my color coding system. You know the reinforcers you sometimes use on your notebooks to make the holes around the rings stronger? I put those reenforcers around the holes on the recorder, it adds a little texture and I color code as for lower notes are red and higher notes are green. Depends upon if you're using seven notes you can use the color scheme, nature’s rainbow color scheme - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. That helps the students, it gives a double layer, it gives a texture and another dimension of that multisensory way to understand that understand that learning concept, so that is helpful. Instrumental, also, I tend to use marks within the music to help them follow the music so they are not overwhelmed. I use a lot of structure in order to prepare a rehearsal so that students again are able to follow and that is part of the information is small steps. First, we do this piece of music, then the next one and this follows and we're done. Helping to organize is part of the strategies of these effective teaching components. For special questions on adapting instrumental lines so a person who is not as technically advanced as another, we will be very happy to help with that off the webinar.

ALAN NUNEZ: I would like to jump in because the second part of the question has to do with music history. I don't know if that has to do with music history as a form of music appreciation. I want to share something. I worked with a high school this year of students with emotional challenges. It was right at the time that Pete Seeger passed. I did not realize how deep of a personal connection I had to his own thoughts, unfortunately, until he passed and everything came flooding back. I called and changed the whole lesson plan to reflect with these learners how music changes society. I know when we talk about special needs education, a lot of times we're talking about autism; we're talking about physical challenges and we’re talking about cognitive challenges. But I love working with my students who have BD because number one, I'm a drummer so I'm giving them a permission to hit something and not get sent to the office as

long as we hit it at rhythm, as long as we do it together. In terms of the modeling, Pete Seeger modeled exactly what we're asking or at least what I'm asking my students to be, to change the world for the better. So that might be off the topic but when you mention music history and modeling, that is the first thing that came up.

LISA DAMICO: That was great, Nancy says thank you. She says, “How can subjects like music history be taught to middle school inclusion classrooms in a hands-on way?” I think you got right to that.

ELISE SOBOL: I can add to that for Nancy's question. I feel that our famous composers had had such interesting lives. To make those lives contextually connected to our students will help their social and emotional lives. You know Beethoven’s life. Vivaldi was a redhaired priest who felt like he never felt it. He took his priestly orders and he could not serve in a church so he eneded up having a job for 40 years in a girls' orphanage and the girls came in playing a variety of music. One composer after another had something to bring to the 21st century learner and it is just to hook their lives in with our today's student, which makes the learning of history just my favorite subject, actually.

ALAN NUNEZ: Mine, too. Mine, too.

LISA DAMICO: Great, our next question comes from Carol Anne. What do you mean by multimodal?

ELISE SOBOL: Okay, as I explained, multi is many. How many different ways can you describe the same concept? So, let's look at something like… oh a box. OK, a box can be made of different materials. It has four corners. It can be a container. It could have a lid. It could be stackable. What do you use a box for? So how many different ways do you convey the meaning of what a box is to your students? That may not be the best example, Alan, maybe you can give another example? We go to a park. A park has a lake in it. It is not like parking the car so you have to describe the difference between parking a car and going to a park where there are green trees. Again, find the concept that you want to teach and find different ways to describe it. Go, Alan.

ALAN NUNEZ: I just got done finishing teaching five classes of kindergarteners and I know it was a successful day because the teaching got better. I know sometimes we think, oh I think I really failed that first class because the coffee did not kick in. Being a teacher, you're always in the process of doing things better. My last class we really nailed something. So the object of the lesson today was to take our orff instruments, for those who are not familiar, the orff instruments, in this particular case are xylophones that are different pitches and they’re also different sizes. If I knew I was talking about this I would have brought some to show you. They come off the instrument so you can display musical concepts back. I took all of the notes off and I believe there were 12 keys on there. So the purpose of today's lesson is how do we put them in the right order, the correct order, going from the lowest pitch to the highest? In terms of multimodal, I gave them three, or they figured out three strategies for that. Number one, the letter of the note was written on the actual key. So we wrote out C, D, E, F, G, A, that can be a little confusing, we don't start out with A. Once we go to B, we get to C and go back up again. So that’s one mode. Another mode is pitch. So when you play from left to right, it should sound as if you're playing on a piano. Bum, bum, bum. From right to left, you should hear something descending. Kids know this. Kids know what something should sound like. The third mode I used today and it was the one they most gravitated to was size order. Teachers are saying line up in size order. So what did they do? I had them not even go to the instrument, but in front of the instrument, line up in C, line up the D, line up the E. I tell you where they got tripped up. There is two F's. There is an F like this and an F like this. Using one mode tripped them up because they went C, D, E, F, G, A. Using that other mode, we said does that F belong in there because he looks really short compared to the one on the left and the one on his right. “Oh, OK.” So they switched the bigger F with the smaller f.

ELISE SOBOL: That was really concrete. Did our listener understand that what we're teaching then is the order of those notes? So the three different ways that he did was size, was pitch, and the actual letter name. I was working with guitars with my students today and I actually used colored strings and we were playing one of the elementary songs adapted from Van Morrison, it was called Shaky and they were using the purple

string and the thicker green string next to it. The E and the B. Some of my students are color blind so they could not tell the different colors. So they could not tell the color mode, but they could tell the thick and the thin. The other concept of that, the thinner, the string, the higher the sound, the thicker the lower the sound. That would be called multimodal.

ALAN NUNEZ: That is great.

ELISE SOBOL: It’s a little hard for us to get to the example, but I'm glad you had the great day because it made my explanation clearer too.

LISA DAMICO: It made it clearer for Carol Ann as well as she said “yes, I did not know it was called that.” The questions are pouring in now. Can you explain more about what you mean about music being a whole brain intelligence?

ELISE SOBOL: Absolutely. There is a researcher and he explains it best. His name is Brian Tracy. When you listen to a song, your -- let's see which is -- you listen to the lyrics on the left-hand side, you listen to the emotions on the right-hand side and the limbic system connects it. Research has shown that there is activity when music, even listening, is involved throughout the entire brain. So one of the things we do as music and special education teachers and instrumentalists is do activities which cross our midline. They cross our belly button area because when we use our hands to cross our midline the same thing happens when you're reading from left to ride, you cross your midline with your eye tracking. You are going from one hemisphere to the other and with the new facts on brains’ plasticity, new neural path ways are grown through this activity. Music can strengthen areas which are deficit through this whole brain interaction. It is just one of gifts we have for being musical creatures. People call our musical intelligence our birthright. It starts when we're rocking one-two in our mother's womb; we hear her respiration, we feel her heartbeat. We're very rhythmic creatures. When we can build upon that natural rhythm, then the learning can take place.

LISA DAMICO: That was a lovely explanation. Thank you, Elise.

ELISE SOBOL: You're welcome.

LISA DAMICO: The next question comes from Eliza. Have you guys had students who are not into music? If so, how is this managed when you use music assisted learning?

ELISE SOBOL: I wonder what she means when she says not into music. Do they have sensory issues?

ALAN NUNEZ: That is a good question.

ELISE SOBOL: Because there’s many reasons why the musical environment might be too bombarding for them.

LISA DAMICO: She says, “maybe they don't respond to music.”

ELISE SOBOL: How are they showing you that they are not responding to music? Many of our students who are on the autism spectrum, who have severe cognitive delays, may not know how to somehow outwardly they are responding to music, but in their rocking or in their physical behaviors they may. Again, the response may be the most minute, they may be blinking in rhythm. There’s just so many things. I know if you have a class of 30-35 students, you may not be able to see the response because it is not as typical as the next person's response. But remember, students with delay, it just takes longer. So just always believe that the music will have a positive effect. Just like any other human being, perhaps the material that you are using doesn't speak to that student, so they might be acting out in some way, shape, or form. We're lucky that we have world music at our fingertips. If something does want work in our classroom, we're going to try another thing.

LISA DAMICO: Thank you, our next question -- Eliza says great! Our next question comes from Gwendolyn, “As teaching artists, it is sometimes challenging to communicate the depth of learning that musical instruction has on students to other classroom teachers or school representatives who are less comfortable with music. In general, how can teaching artists make the depth of learning that takes place in music activities more transparent to classroom teachers so they are also able to connect these activities to their own teaching?”

ELISE SOBOL: Alan, you're considered the teaching artist.

LISA DAMICO: Haha, she’s going to put you on the spot.

ALAN NUNEZ: No, this is good. I feel like my answer is not going to complete. One aspect of that is, this actually applies to what Elise was just talking about as well, which is if you're in a situation where you have paras, particularly a one-to-one para – um, for those of you, sorry, let me be more clear. A paraprofessional is someone who’s in the room to help the teacher help the students achieve their goals. A one-to-one para means that this particular student was assigned one particular person to work with that. Talking to those professionals in the room, working with the O.T., the occupational therapist, the speech therapist, and the physical therapist. I find that I get my best ammunition from those people. And I’ll tell you -- this was a good day for me. I just had a conversation with an occupational therapist where I told you we were working on the orff instruments. So once the kids completed their orff instruments, their prize at the end, was that they get their mallet and they get to play. Of course, every kid wants to do that. One of my students works with an occupational therapist. He has incredible balance issues just walking down the hallway can be a challenge. He has gross and fine motor control challenges as well. Watching him try his hardest to start to strike those instruments to make sure he went dum, dum, dum instead of dum, dum, dum. It was just amazing. So as soon as I got done to the class I had to sign up for this webinar but I took a minute and I spoke to the O.T. and I said, “you have got to see what music is doing for David. This is amazing.” So she and I are -- she is waiting for me. We're going to talk after this and we're going to use music to see if we can achieve goals on David's I.E.P. Now I'm lucky, I have a principal who believes in the power of music. But, how great is that to go to the principal and say this isn't just us singing and this and that? That is beautiful, maybe your principal does not believe in that. We're reaching I.E.P. goals that maybe you did not think were possible, but are.

ELISE SOBOL: That’s the key, the communication between the classroom teacher, with the teaching artist, to demonstrate to administration that this collaboration is indeed invaluable for the whole school community.

LISA DAMICO: We, I think, have time for one more question. We've had several people who have asked for resources for brief activities, for example, 15-minute games that you could recommend

to give K-3 students a chance to loosen up between more structured creative activities or a good source for easily learned educational songs.

ELISE SOBOL: So I have a very large resource bank of successful games and loosen up activities and I would be very happy if the person asking the question contacts me directly and I will pay that information forward to her, pass it forward to her with pleasure. And any of the other listeners. You know, experience is only good if you share it with another person.

LISA DAMICO: I think that’s going to be a wonderful resource.

ALAN NUNEZ: A resource I use particularly with my younger kids is, you know, I'm a percussionist so I often come in with a djembe. The simple act of putting your right hand up and putting it in the air eight times and counting. Then changing and then adding your feet, adding your elbow, adding your hips, there is so much variety that can do there. We do language acquisition. Let's learn how to count from one to eight in Spanish, in Italian, in Japanese. What else do we have two of that we can operate independently? I have my kids take a basic thing and they told me what they want the warm-up to look like. Even though it’s seems like it’s a lot of intellectual work going on, it’s just a wonderful relief and sometimes I do it in the middle of class.

LISA DAMICO: Thank you. I am going to put it back on my screen as we wrap our webinar up. So I would like to ask you, our webinar participants, to remain on the webinar a few moments longer and complete a survey that will open when you close this window. I would like to thank, Alan, Elise, and Phil for presenting this great webinar today. I think you have given our participants a lot of resources to use in their classrooms. Thank you for joining us. If you have questions or comments please don't hesitate to contacts me. With that I will end our webinar. Thank you, everyone.

ELISE SOBOL: Thank you very much.

ALAN NUNEZ: Thank you.

PHIL ALEXANDER: Good luck, everybody.

LISA DAMICO: BYE