Teaching students with special needs can be an extremely rewarding experience, but it has its challenges. If you’ve been approached by a parent of a child with special needs, you may have been too intimidated to take them on. You may have felt that you weren’t prepared or qualified to deal with their unique learning style.

Well, Dr. Scott Price is on the podcast today to help prepare you to teach any child that comes your way by responding to each student’s needs.

Dr Price’s journey into teaching students with special needs started with one very special student and grew from there. He has gone on to teach plenty of students with autism, ADHD, visual impairments and hearing impairments. He keeps careful notes on the triggers and routines of each of his students so that he can tailor his teaching to suit each individual.

Parents turn to Scott for his ability to adapt his teaching to suit their child, and I think we can all learn a lot from his approach to teaching students with special needs.

[spp-tweet tweet=”To teach special needs students, you’ve got to get creative.”]

Transcript

Please find a full transcript of this episode at the bottom of this page. Alternatively, click below to download a PDF. If you are an Inner Circle Member, you can find the full video and transcript in the Member Resources Area. Not a member? See below for how you can get $50 off your membership today. 

In this episode, you’ll learn

• How Scott got started teaching students with special needs
• Some of the ways Scott has adapted his teaching for different students
• The typical outcomes from these piano lessons
• The unexpected effects piano playing has in other areas for students with special needs
• What you should do in a first lesson/interview with a student with special needs
• Some of the terminology around autism and the autistic spectrum
• The social expectations you need to set out for students with autism
• What practice looks like for Scott’s piano students

Links Mentioned

• Inclusive Piano Teaching Blog
• TopMusicPro’s Teaching Students with Special Needs Course

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Thank you for Tuning In!

There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, and I’m grateful that you’ve chosen mine.

Being a full-time teacher myself, I know how busy teachers are and how much time, effort and passion we put into our students. Sometimes, the last thing we want to do in our time off is listen to more piano teaching stuff! So, well done for using this time for self-improvement.

Whether you’re at the gym, on the bike or in the car, I know that you and your students will get lots out of what you learn in the long run. Just make sure you try out some of the ideas before they get lost in the business of your next lessons.

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Full Transcript

[spp-transcript]

Do you teach any students with special needs?

What have you found to be the biggest challenge in teaching these students?

Is there any advice you would give to teachers just starting out with teaching students with special needs?