Teaching Children With Autism

I personally have teaching experience with only one child with autism, and another one with Asperger's Syndrome. My piano student is not one of those "autistic savants" -- one of those individuals who perform brilliantly within a narrow specialization. He is just a nice kid who enjoys music, especially music with which he is familiar.

This makes things pretty hard for him in public school (he does attend school currently), because he seems mature and is very high-functioning in a lot of ways...but he needs more time than kids without autism to work things out.

I have learned to curb my natural impetuosity and occasional flamboyant teaching style somewhat during his lessons, because he finds my enthusiasm more confusing than exciting. Autistic kids just don't understand humor as intuitively as other kids, so I can't interact in just the same way as with other students. Nevertheless, it is a pleasure to teach him and see him make progress.

My autistic student struggles with rhythm. Where others count numbers evenly spaced ("1...2...3...4..."), he may count "1-2....1-2...1,1,1-2!" Counting with a metronome, rather than helping, is terribly distracting for him. (Staying focused is very hard for kids with autism. His mother has told me that tree branches moving outside the window will also break up his concentration...and indeed I can see him struggling to re-focus numerous times during a lesson.) Hand gestures from me (as in a simple kind of conducting) work much better than a metronome to help him "hold" a half note for its 2 beats, or a whole note for 4 beats.

The music that seems to work best for my autistic student is music he has heard before in video games or movies, famous tunes such as Ode to Joy and Yankee Doodle, and very dramatic melodies such as the first phrase from Bach's Toccata in Dm. (He learned it by rote, one figure at a time.) He LOVES the 12-Bar Blues, which is not really a song at all, but just a group of chords with a simple melody, a pattern that gets more and more complex as students' abilities increase and we add more to it.

When the Fabers of FJH Music came out with their new series "My First Piano Adventures," I took him out of the regular Primer ("the Purple Book," as we call it at my studio) and switched him to the B level book of the new series. It was pretty easy for him, giving him reachable goals from month to month. He tends to stay on the same couple of pieces for about 3 weeks. He is now in the C Book, over halfway through, and doing fine.

Actual note-reading is not too hard for him, though like a lot of kids, he finds it difficult to make changes and correct errors, once he has been playing a piece for a few days. His biggest problem seems to be a failure to "hear" how the song should be executed. Frequently, his pieces don't feel like they have a direction, a goal --it sounds more like his fingers are tapping computer keys, rather than one note leading to the next. Unless he really likes a piece of music, he may not be focused enough to make it SOUND like music. But he CAN make some of his pieces sound musical.

His hand position is still not entirely what it should be. Though he has a decent arch in the shape of his hand posture, his finger number 5 is always wanting to curl under his palm, in a way I've never seen in any other student. I tend not to try to fix everything in one lesson; this is a boy with a lot of challenges at school, and autistic kids can be prone to depression. I want him to improve, but I don't want to add to the burdens in his life.

Over the last few years, I've given him such music as the Pink Panther, Imperial March (from Star Wars), Spiderman, the James Bond Theme, the Batman Theme... you get the picture. All these pieces were re-arranged by me into simple adaptations, with as rich a harmony as I could contrive that I felt wouldn't overwhelm my student. (I'm sorry I can't share them with you -- copyright issues-- but I am sure you can write them out for your student yourself.)

He also loves Halloween music --it has mood, drama, a sense of story behind it. FJH's Spotlight I has a few fun Halloween pieces at the beginning of the book. I have also written some easy and creepy-sounding Halloween pieces suitable for early readers, being right around Middle C position, which have been great favorites of his.

Over time, I have decided to teach my autistic piano-player pretty much the way I teach all my students, but more slowly, and with much more repetition.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned with him is:

Teach it the first time the way I want him to play it eventually. No simplified versions along the way to getting to the difficult version. His memory is too long, and apparently too inflexible.

For example, he learned the easiest version of Hark How the Bells (Carol of the Bells, or Ukrainian Bell Carol) in which the left hand takes the primary motif. Then, some time later, I decide it was time for him to learn the regular "easy" version. WRONG!

Despite careful preparation each week with the new version and the rhythmic motif in the right hand, lesson after lesson he would come back, look at the new music, and play the old version! I decided it was not a good use of our time, and that we will re-visit the song MUCH later. I made the same mistake with the 12-Bar-Blues, giving him an easier, but different right hand part than I gave my other students, knowing we would eventually switch. Again, bad idea. He had a hard time letting go of the old pattern, because it was so ingrained (and he liked it). This time I persevered, treating the piece as a duet between him and me, and at last we won through. One week, he finally played the basic pattern for me, WITH SYNCOPATION, just as well as many of my more naturally musical kids. Now the door to using all of the blues scale is opening for him.

The summer before he entered the 6th Grade of public school (age 11 or so here in the U.S.) I was a little concerned about the mandatory band requirement. While I would not want to imply that any child with a desire to be in a musical group should be persuaded not to join, I was worried about the attitude of the other kids when he failed to keep the beat. This is an important consideration in a band! It is hard to balance the needs of an individual child against the aims of a group which necessarily aims for precision. Of course, beginning bands rarely sound like precision machines. But my autistic student feels very keenly the disapproval of other school kids, and it is a source of depression for him...potentially a dangerous situation.

His parents --apart from any input from me-- decided against his joining band and persuaded the school to give him another option.

My autistic piano player really does enjoy conquering a piece and playing it with energy. He doesn't polish most of his music, and I probably give him too much to work on, but he steadily improves. Without lots of review, he does lose his old pieces (well, don't they all?).

I would like to hear from other teachers to know how they encourage growth in their autistic students...so if you are willing to share your story or your questions with me and visitors to this site, please make use of the invitation form below! To see what others have said, please scroll to the bottom of this page.

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