Blog on Meet Them in Music

Book Review: Love Builds Brains

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:53:00 +0000

Jean Clinton is a Canadian developmental psychiatrist, and Love Builds Brains is her accessible, practitioner-facing argument that children’s behavior, learning, and long-term wellbeing are not primarily a matter of discipline or motivation. They are a matter of neuroscience, and more specifically, of relationships.

Quote of the Book

“Every child needs a person whose eyes light up when they walk in the room”

Dr Jean Clinton

The brain is not a finished product

Your lessons need a predictable structure

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:22:00 +0000

When I started teaching students with disabilities, my entire formal preparation consisted of one undergraduate course where I learned initialisms (ASD, MoCi, etc) and the word “differentiation.” The rest I had to figure out in the room, with real students, through a lot of trial and a fair amount of error.

What I have landed on, after years of refining, comes down to two things: a predictable lesson structure and a visual schedule. They are strategies that work together, and once you see why, you won’t want to teach without them.

Your classroom layout is a behavior management tool - here's how to use it

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:48:00 +0000

West Japan Railway had a problem that signage and staffing can’t fully solve: passengers — particularly those who have been drinking — stand up from platform benches and fall onto the tracks.

Their solution was not to add a warning. It was to rotate the benches 90 degrees.

That is the idea behind this post.

Your music room is already shaping how your students respond. The direction the chairs face, the distance between floor spots, the presence or absence of a designated calm space, and window coverings are not neutral features of the room. They are behavioral nudges. For students who are expressing their needs through behavior, those nudges either work for them or against them.

Choice Boards: The Gateway to Speech and Song

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:45:00 +0000

Here’s a moment you’ve probably had. You’re about to launch into a singing activity, the kind your class is going to love, and you glance over at the student who is non-speaking or minimally verbal. And you quietly ask yourself: what do I do with them right now?

It’s an honest question. And most music teachers who ask it are already doing more than they give themselves credit for. The ones who don’t ask have already answered it, usually in one of two ways:

Welcome to Meet Them in Music

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Somewhere along the way, you got a student who didn’t fit the lesson you planned. Maybe they couldn’t hold the instrument the way the method book showed. Maybe the echo song fell apart because processing the call took longer than the response allowed. Maybe you looked at a room full of kids and realized your go-to repertoire wasn’t reaching the kid in the corner, and you didn’t know why, and nobody had ever taught you what to try instead.