Creative Piano Pedagogy
This podcast is an enriching resource designed specifically for piano teachers and music educators working with out-of-the-box students: students with disabilities, physical or learning differences, gifted and 2-E learners and neurodivergent students. Each episode delves into innovative teaching strategies, offering insights and practical solutions that promote creativity, inclusivity, and approaches teaching from a positive and student-first environment.
Pedagogue, researcher and music educator Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Everhart will demystify topics such as technique, communication, piano methods, understanding behaviors, autism, ADHD, dyslexia and much more- all with a focus on encouraging teachers to meet the diverse needs of their students and inspiring them to embrace new ideas and cultivate the musical potential of every learner.
Creative Piano Pedagogy
Beyond the Curved Finger: Rethinking Piano Technique for Neurodivergent Students
The journey of teaching piano technique to students with disabilities presents unique challenges that require creativity, patience, and a willingness to adapt. Traditional approaches—filled with flowery language about rainbows and waterfalls—simply don't connect with neurodivergent students who think concretely and pragmatically.
Teaching piano technique to students with disabilities requires adaptability, patience, and a willingness to break from traditional approaches while maintaining pedagogical integrity. Success comes through adapting our approach, not by lowering expectations! Learn more in this first episode on teaching technique.
Find the full transcript, show notes or links mentioned in the episode here!
Subscribe to Elizabeth's email list here so you won’t miss future courses, freebies, teacher events and more.
Subscribe to the Creative Piano Pedagogy Blog:
On the website
Follow on Facebook
Follow on Instagram
Follow on YouTube
Questions or suggestions? Send Elizabeth an email:
creativepianopedagogy@gmail.com
Hi friends, and welcome back to the third episode of Creative Piano Pedagogy. If you're new here, thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you have a chance to go back and check out the last few episodes. That'll give you a little context for this series in Adaptive Piano Pedagogy and all that entails. I do want to give a shout out to everyone who's listening today, because every time I upload an episode, Buzzsprout lets me know kind of the general area of where my listeners are tuning in. So we have had folks from the United States of America, Canada, Australia, India, Argentina, Malaysia, the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Russia- oh my goodness! Wherever you're listening, thank you so much and feel free to use that little 'text me' feature in the little about tab below the podcast and let me know where you're listening from. I've gotten a couple messages from there and they just totally made my day. So thank you very much.
Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Everhart:Last week was an unintentional hiatus due to a very unwelcome visit from what I called the unholy trinity: the flu, pneumonia and a sinus infection. I am feeling so much better, but I did have to miss almost two entire weeks of teaching, which is something that I really hate to do. So, anyways, glad to be feeling better, glad to be back at things and excited for today's episode.
Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Everhart:Today's podcast is centered on a topic that feels, honestly, way too big for just one short episode. So I am positiv e will revisit this in the future, but we're going to dive into ways to adapt our teaching approach of piano technique, what that looks like and how to make it work for students with physical and learning disabilities and differences. So before we get into this, the elephant in the room- and one of the most discussed questions in online piano teacher forums- yes, we do teach technique to students with disabilities, yes, they are able to play with good technique, but no, it does not look the same and it will not look the same as teaching technique to a neurotypical learner who does not have these challenges. So just to get that out there- yes, we do it, yes, we can and yes, they are able to do it, but it just will not look the same. Remember, the pedagogy of what we do remains the same, but our approach adapts for each student. That is the beauty and the essence of adaptive piano pedagogy and piano teaching.
Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Everhart:So why is it so difficult to teach technique to students with disabilities? There are a myriad of reasons for this, but I'm just going to highlight some of the main ones..
Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Everhart:1. The physical requirements for playing an instrument, specifically the piano, necessitate the ability for a student to utilize their arms, their fingers and their hands and have a strong core, to be seated with good playing and sitting posture. Also due to the physical nature of playing the piano, we as teachers are often hyper-focused on students' fingers Like- oh no, their fingers aren't curved. And, by the way, this is a side note- did you know that teaching students to curve their fingers does not actually equate with healthy technique or translate to even playing technical passages and repertoire? Oh boy... as we often say, "that's a big can of worms y'all. I think that's an episode and maybe some videos for another time. But I digress for another time. But I digress. We panic when a student's hands and fingers do not look like how they we think they should. So we focus really hard on making them look correct and I'm using air quotes there "correct, as in air quotes.
Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Everhart:2. Students with disabilities also have sensory sensitivities that can range from being quite mild to extremely severe. So it can be really challenging to just get in there and physically help a student achieve good technique. This often involves a very hands-on (no pun intended approach) to teaching, where you're kind of adjusting the fingers of your student or moving their hands around, helping them feel the weight or helping them feel the gesture or whatever. So adding a layer of sensitivity and even just removing the aspect of using your hands to manipulate your students can make things much more challenging for a lot of teachers who are accustomed to teaching that way.
Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Everhart:3. So let's think about this how is technique typically taught besides using a very hands-on approach, what we just talked about? I don't know about you, but in master classes or in university level teaching, it's often taught in very flowery language, with flowing gestures, lots of verbiage, lots of analogies about nature, using our imagination and imagery and waterfalls and flowers and thinking of your arm like it's a branch of a tree and all of this kind of thing.
Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Everhart:But for neurodivergent students, especially those with autism, they really struggle to think in the hypothetical. They do not do well with vague terms or maybes or hypothetical explanations. They think in the here and now, in the black and white, very pragmatic, very practical. They really cannot liken their arms to branches on a tree or their hands to rainbows to achieve perfect playing technique. It quite literally does not work most of the time because it's just not how they learn or think. Now, this is not because they don't possess the ability, but because we're just speaking the wrong language. It does not work for them when we take this approach.
Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Everhart:Another challenge in teaching technique is communication. We've already talked about the physical aspect of teaching technique and how we need to manipulate students' hands, but communication is one of the biggest struggles when teaching students with disabilities. Learning to communicate with them, learning to understand their way of communicating, understanding the phrases and types of instruction that even work for them. It takes time. Students with disabilities kind of speak their own language and dialect. So even students who may have autism, or several students with autism might all think, learn and communicate differently. So i t's not a one- size- fits- all approach when teaching technique or when figuring out how to teach technique.
Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Everhart:Something else to keep in mind is that students with disabilities learn better with an approach that starts with the whole and then goes to the part. This is 100% the opposite way that we were taught to teach. I don't know about you, but I was always taught to teach- you know, show your students the part and then that will result in the whole. This is opposite. Kids with disabilities learn better by looking at the whole picture. Then they're able to understand each part. They cannot look at a whole picture like a whole piece and then, you know, do this on their own. They need to start with playing maybe the first whole line, then extrapolating different parts, and they can see how that works. It doesn't work to go the other way around with them.
Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Everhart:Most of the time, students with disabilities often have a difficult time transferring concepts. What that means is- if I were to use flashcards with a student, like sight reading flashcards, and maybe these flashcards had the same kinds of patterns that my student's piece does; perhaps it's patterns using steps and skips, and I were to do those flashcards and then, maybe 10 minutes later, I were to pull out their music and we were to do their music, they would not transfer the knowledge from the flashcards to the music. Why? It's the very same. It's the same kinds of patterns. It might even be the very same pattern, but it's not to them. They are such concrete thinkers, they're so black and white, they're so pragmatic. The flashcard and the music on the page are very different. They are physically not the same. One is the flashcard, one is a piece of music, which is 100% true, isn't it? They are different and they're not the same things. You know, the music might have treble clef and bass clef and many more measures, and the sight reading card might just have very few things. So that's a very small explanation of how students might struggle to transfer things from an abstract activity like flashcards or exercises away from the repertoire and then applying those principles to their playing and making that inference and transference.
Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Everhart:The combination of all of this makes teaching technique very difficult and it makes it a challenge for teachers and students. There's an assumption that many teachers make: since my neurodivergent students hands, fingers, arms do not coordinate and work the way they should or the way I'm used to, they cannot play XYZ, standard repertoire, classical repertoire, jazz repertoire, hymns, whatever, fill in the blank. Maybe they think they cannot play scales or articulations. Some teachers even think that students whose fingers and hands work differently cannot play with expression or play more advanced repertoire. Folks, this is so very false. I want you to remember this: Our students are not limited until we place limitations or assumed limitations on them. Yes! Our students are not limited until we place limitations or assumed limitations on them.
