Why we aren’t creating a commercial adaptive music curriculum

We keep hearing from music teachers that they would really like to find a comprehensive adaptive music curriculum that they can purchase and follow with their sub-separate classes. They want to do right by their students, their time is seriously limited, and they’re looking for trustworthy leaders in this space who will give them support in the form of a roadmap.

We get it. That sounds GREAT. 

We understand that there is a desire and even a need for this product. Teachers are already asked to do too much. Creating curriculum from scratch is daunting to anyone in the sheer amount of work that it entails, it’s a task that few teachers have had to do before, and most teachers feel under-prepared for meeting the needs of this student population. This is especially challenging for teachers who are new to the profession and dealing with the overwhelm that every first year teacher experiences, and trying to build all of their classroom materials and supplies and routines from the ground up. 

Gosh, do I want to help them. Teachers are my people. 

Here’s the thing: because the needs, interests and abilities of disabled students with high support needs are so diverse, we can’t create a single curriculum that works for all of them.

Put another way, students with high support needs collectively face a wide range of potential barriers in music class stemming from sensory differences, cognitive/intellectual differences, attentional differences, social differences, communication differences, physical differences and more. In any given music class activity with a high needs group, the teacher is likely to have to creatively accommodate anticipated and unanticipated needs during implementation. It’s more important that teachers are trained in an appropriate mindset of systematically observing students to identify and remove barriers, and prioritizing students’ internal experiences and wellbeing.

We could create an adaptive music curriculum, but we couldn’t be confident in its ability to meet the needs of all learners in an adaptive class. We wouldn’t want teachers to purchase a curriculum from us and misunderstand its limitations to the detriment of their students. Students come first. 

Also? To be honest, our hearts aren’t in that grind. We’re educators, not entrepreneurs. (Would you like a list of all the obvious ways I’m not a strong businessperson? This would be low on the list…) We will keep sharing our ideas, mostly for free and some for a reasonable cost.