Austin-based guitar teacher Jenny Reynolds taught high school English in New England for four years before moving to Texas. Recently she’s been drawing on her graduate-level training in education and her experience in the classroom to teach private students with dyslexia and other learning disabilities. “I wasn’t a special ed teacher,” she notes, “but everybody who is certified is trained in special ed, so I took those courses and have experience with special ed kids.” She currently teaches privately at her students’ homes and at Clavier-Werke, a piano school in Austin that also offers guitar instruction.
When it comes to working with learning-disabled students, she says, the first thing is to make as little of the disability as possible. “If it’s really going to be an issue, the parent will usually tell you,” Reynolds points out. “It’s important to keep things fun,” she adds. “The minute the kid starts to feel like this learning issue is in the lesson, it’s not fun anymore. For a lot of these kids, guitar lessons are a release. They’ll get an electric guitar for Christmas and it’s bright red, it doesn’t look like anything they have at school, and it kind of looks like something that dashes authority.”

Hands-On Learning
Reynolds’ most important strategy is having more than one mode of explanation up her sleeve at all times. “Dyslexia is actually a low-level perception issue; it’s not a cognitive problem,” she explains. “The concepts are not beyond these kids, so as soon as they get them, they’ve got them.” But since dyslexic students by definition have trouble perceiving letters and numbers in the correct order, they’re at a disadvantage when it comes to learning visually through music notation or tablature. To get around that, Reynolds will focus instead on auditory or kinesthetic styles of learning.
Someone with a kinesthetic learning style learns best in the most hands-on way. For those students, says Reynolds, “I’ll almost offer no information and just say, ‘OK, here are the chords; I want you to do what I’m doing,’” she explains. “And then the student just mirrors what I’m doing. Now, one student may get a lot out of that approach, but--and this is irrespective of any learning disability--another student might become intimidated immediately and not want to do what I’m doing.” In that case, Reynolds might turn to an auditory approach. The same student who balks at mirroring the teacher may be comfortable working by ear alone, preferring to hear something first and then try it herself.

The Confidence Game
To Reynolds, a big part of her job is instilling confidence in students who may not have much faith in themselves to learn at all. “A lot of kids who have any kind of disability come into a situation wanting to do something but feeling like they can’t. So one thing that works with them is saying, ‘Yes you can, you already did.’ Or ‘This song is not as hard as the one you just learned; I bet you can do it.” And then as soon as they conquer one song, you say, ‘Well, you said that this song was hard, but you got that; what makes you think that you can’t get this song because it’s hard?’”
Reynolds will also use the kinesthetic approach to do an end-run around a student’s self-perception. “For sight-reading, I’ll teach them how to play something and then show them the sheet music or the tab for what they just played,” she explains, “and when they say, ‘I can’t do this,’ I can say, ‘You just did.’”

Conquering Fear of Sheet Music
With one student in particular, she worked step by step on a Christmas carol, slowly leading him toward the point where the written music would make sense. “I gave him the first phrase and just had him mimic me,” she recalls, “and then we wrote down the tab together. Eventually I gave him the sheet music from the book, with the notes above the tab. And finally, I whited out the tab, and he would play it from the music only.”
For a concept like time signatures, Reynolds will also work backwards from the music to the symbols and explanations. “The written language of music and the written language of letters can be ineffective as the primary ways to explain something to a kid, especially with a new concept,” she observes. Instead, she recommends bringing in recordings or playing songs oneself to illustrate what different meters sound like.