Advocating for a blind student in your orchestra class

Stock photos of a young person with a white cane and on the other side three students playing viola and cello, courtesy of Canva.

I taught orchestra for many years in Central Kitsap School District in Washington state, US. I had the privilege of having one blind student during that time. I wanted to share the things I learned from working with her. For this article, I have changed the name of the student, to keep her anonymous.

1. Plan Ahead: Since your student will need to have music memorized in order to perform or even practice with the group, you can not program songs where you learn them in a short time right before a performance. For me, this really altered the way I thought about the teaching environment. I usually had each group in grades 7–9, perform 3–5 songs at any concert. And I tried to have maybe 8 or so that we were working on. When the time got closer to a concert, I would choose, sometimes with input from the students, which songs sounded best. With a blind student in the group, I had to choose at the start which songs would be performed, to make sure the right music got made into braille copies and to give time for memorizing. I had all the songs we were working on transcribed into braille, but I told Noel which songs to focus on based on what I thought we would perform. If things started to look different then I would make sure to communicate this.
2. Creating Braille Music: All sheet music you expect your student to perform must be translated to braille and this can take some time. So, it’s important to plan ahead as much as possible. Now there are notation software programs that can do this, but you still need the braille printer and it’s still a lot of work to scan and print with a different format, so you can’t just pull any music out of your files and start to play it with your group. When I was working with Noel we had to wait a month to get the music transcribed to braille and then we could print on the school’s braille printer. But, you just need to factor all of this in. It might mean that you work with less music with your group. One workaround, if you want to expose the other students to more songs, is you can introduce a few easier pieces at times and just tell the students, this is just for sightreading practice and we aren’t going to perform. I got in trouble with one such situation when the kids instantly took to an easier piece that I didn’t plan on performing and it was about a week before a concert. I had to tell the rest of the class that, even though it sounded good, we couldn’t perform at this particular concert because I wanted to make sure that everyone could play.
3. Designate a Helper: I learned a few lessons by trial and error. I had one embarrassing moment when the orchestra got up to play and Noel was left sitting by herself in the chairs because no one bothered to help her get up to the front. I looked at the orchestra when we were tuning and realized Noel was missing and then had to escort her from her seat. So, after that, I made sure one of the students was assigned to help out.
4. Handling Non-Verbal Cues: Also, when starting the group, I had non-verbal signals for having instruments on the knee, to instruments up, and then finally a downbeat to start playing. Noel came up with a signal where she asked the student next to her to tap her foot when we did each of these changes or after a long period of rest when her part needed to come in again. Other students might come up with something different, but some sort of non-verbal cue system needs to be used.
5. Priority Seating: I tended to always have seating auditions with my students that had been playing for more than 2 years. However, Noel needed to be in the front of the room in order to hear my directions better and respond to what was going on in the music. I just told the students that she needed to sit there and so the person next to her was the first chair and then the rest followed after that. Make sure to clearly communicate with the other students if you need to give a child priority seating in a different place than normal. You don’t have to go into details, you can just say this is necessary for this student.
6. Education of the other students: I did retreats each year with my orchestra students where we had an all-day chance to play music and get to know each other. I felt this increased the sense of teamwork with the kids and made them play better. When I had Noel in my class, I asked her to design an activity so that the other students could experience a little bit of what it was like to be blind. So, she decided to make them eat blindfolded, with a partner that could see. One was the blind person for one meal and the other was the blind person for the other meal. The person who could see had to help the other one. This still produced some goofy situations with the kids, but I loved that while they were eating at the table with Noel, she was able to be the expert. She gave them all a tip to put the bread in their lap when they were eating spaghetti so that it wouldn’t get mixed in with the rest of the noodles and sauce. I also asked Nicole to do a presentation for the rest of the class during that retreat to explain a bit of what she had to do to read the music, memorize and then play her instrument. I was also surprised to see how many pages the music was in braille compared to regular notation. If I had a blind student again, I would try to do an activity like this at the start of the year to help the other kids with understanding and being more inclusive to Noel.
7. Advocate and be proactive: Noel ended up sometimes getting upset with the other kids because the little bits of noise or side comments that can be normal in any classroom, made things near impossible for Noel. If she did speak up and tell them they had to be quiet, the kids were always very respectful and calm for the rest of that lesson. But, I wish that I had been more proactive about trying to keep the classroom as quiet as possible to help facilitate her learning. (Noel also had some hearing loss in one ear, so she truly couldn’t hear my instructions when others were talking.)

I felt greatly blessed to have Noel in the orchestra class. If I had to do it over, I would try to prepare the rest of the group more from the start for how things would look different in the class and why. And I would continue to advocate for that student so that they could have equal access to feel included in the orchestra. I hope that the tips shared might help you also have a thriving program that is inclusive of blind students.

**I do not have any connection to the braille music software that I link to in this article, but if you read this and it is helpful to you, please let me know.