The following article sample was reprinted from American String Teacher, vol 74, issue 4 with permission from ASTA and the author.
Occasionally, a new student will enter our classrooms and present us with a new pedagogical challenge. While you may initially think you are not equipped to support the student, upon reflection you may just find a key to that student’s success. More times than not, the solutions and strategies to meet these challenges will benefit not only the new student, but their classmates as well. Here are some teaching strategies for helping the hearing impaired, the visually impaired, and students who may struggle with reading musical notation become successful musicians in the K–12 classroom.
Assisting the Hearing Impaired
Two weeks before the school year started, I was told a deaf student would be in my class. I was not sure how I would teach this student, so I watched a documentary about Evelyn Glennie (2005) called, Touch the Sound. Glennie is a professional percussionist who is deaf. The documentary was fascinating, but it did not directly lead to the specificity needed to play guitar.
Further reflection led to a practical solution, “touch the sensation.” If the student could feel the vibration underneath his left-hand fingertip, he would know that he plucked the correct string. If he did not feel the vibration under his fingertip, he did not pluck the correct string. To know if he played the correct open string, he could simply watch the string vibrate.
Assisting the Visually Impaired
Proprioception is the ability to know where your extremities are in space whether or not you are moving. This is quite useful when playing your instrument. Try this exercise yourself and with students:
Step 1: With your guitar in position, drop your left arm so it is down and at your side.
Step 2: Swing your arm from the elbow into a playing position without aiming.
Where did your hand land? For me, my hand consistently lands in 7th position. With this information, I am able to reference the fingerboard without looking at it. If I want to be in fifth position, I swing my arm and feel slight tension as I move my arm to the left. If I want to be in first position, I simply open my armpit. Ninth position is very easy to find by using fine touch. I simply let the side of my fourth finger touch the body of the guitar. Several years ago, a blind student played for me in a master class. I was fascinated by her ability to play along the entire fingerboard with shifts from one position to another. She was a master at proprioception and indiscriminative touch. She learned music from braille music notation and had to memorize it. Using proprioception and indiscriminative touch in this way can help all students with increased facility and shifting on the instrument.
Assisting Students Who Struggle with Musical Notation
Reading music is a learned ability. Many students have difficulty learning this skill. The lines and spaces are often taught with acronyms like Every Good Boy Does Fine for the lines and F-A-C-E for the spaces. While these may be useful at the onset, many students continue to use these years later rather than knowing the notes. In this system, students are scanning from bottom to top for every note.
The sense of vision can be more efficiently applied. Humans look for focal points in the visual field. Edges outline these focal points. The bottom and top lines can be considered edges. The bottom and top lines are alphabetical. In treble clef, the notes are “E” and “F.” The middle line is also a focal point as it is in the center of the edges. The middle line is “B” in treble clef. I teach my students to remember that “B” is between everything. With the bottom, top, and middle lines as focal references, it is easy to apply the alphabet forward and backward.
When I teach the staff, I ask a student who has never read music before to stand at my white board. I point to the notes on the bottom, top, and middle lines and have them tell me the note names. I continue by pointing to notes just below or above the three points of reference then increasingly point more randomly. Most students can identify the notes on the staff within 5 minutes. This may be a much more efficient approach to learning notes on the staff.
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