Collaboration and Access for Our Children: Music Educators and Special Educators Together

Abstract

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Elementary Music Teachers’ Experiences Training and Collaborating With Paraprofessionals

“…Rather than advocating for increased attendance at admission, review, and dismissal meetings, music educators need to request regular meetings without parents and other administrators during the school year. Recognizing the time constraints inherent in most school settings, McCord and Watts (2006) suggested that administrators or roving substitutes may be able to cover classes during meeting times. Regular collaboration need not occur every week or even every month.…”

“…Paraprofessionals are often paid by the hour during the regular school day; therefore, meeting before or after school could represent work without remuneration. As noted by McCord and Watts (2006), trying to collaborate during school hours can be challenging as teachers and paraprofessionals struggle to meet the many daily demands of teaching during the school day. Therefore, administrative support for collaboration is key.…”

“…Scholars have observed that paraprofessionals can be valuable liaisons between special education teachers and music educators by providing information about students' daily behaviors and offering adaptive assistance (Abbott & Sanders, 2013;Moore, 2013). McCord and Watts (2006) acknowledged that music educators, who often cannot attend every admissions, review, and dismissal meeting to discuss individual education plans, could glean important insights from their paraprofessional colleagues. However, paraprofessionals have been unsure what their role should be in the classroom (Bernstorf, 2001;Giangreco, 2013).…”

Inclusion of People with Special Needs in Choral Settings

“…Music teachers also see different behavior and abilities in some children than other teachers, so the conversation should flow both ways, and music teachers should be included in Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings (McCord & Watts, 2006). The communication recommended at the elementary level may also be helpful for secondary choral instructors as they strive to include students with special needs, not only by providing the choral teacher with ideas for specific strategies to help individual children, but also by ensuring that musicspecific supports are included in the IEP.…”

Adapting the music curriculum for senior secondary students with intellectual disabilities in Hong Kong: content, pedagogy and mindsets

“…Encoding these benefits within a special education music curriculum remains a challenging area for music educators (VanWeelden 2007) not least because teachers generally lack an understanding of what it is like to be a student with special needs (Colwell 2013). The absence of a shared perception of being a student with special needs has led to reported marginalisation (Jellison and Wolfe 1987), a narrow focus on music as a therapeutic medium (Patterson 2003) or ill-defined collaboration of both music specialists and special educators (McCord and Watts 2006). Most commonly music specialists undertake teaching of pupils with special needs without support nor training in special education (O'Regan 2007), creating a situation in which the content and pedagogy used in music lessons inevitably vary from school to school.…”