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If you're working with students who have communication impairment,
you have to adopt different strategies.
None of us know what anybody else hears at all.
My voice, when I hear it on a recording, doesn't sound at all like me.
My voice in my head sounds like I know it
and it doesn't when I hear it when it's been recorded.
So it's very difficult to understand what anybody else actually hears.
But there's a huge amount of tactile work that you can do,
particularly using xylophones.
In recent years I've built up the number of xylophones we've got,
not least because if a student is trying to access something on a keyboard
and their listening skills aren't brilliant,
you can't necessarily hear it, perhaps, if it's not too touch-sensitive.
Students struggle with touch-sensitivity on keyboards
because some of them think it's not working
if you don't press the key hard enough.
Whereas xylophones, it's there, it's visual.
If you've got visually impaired kids, it's also there and it's tactile.
You can take the note bars off,
which, although I discourage it,
I take them off and turn them over
so they look different, they feel different,
but the notes are still laid out in the same way.
I'm a great believer in saying,
"You can't take notes off a piano for the ones you don't use."
On a xylophone you can turn them over.
And it's just about not always making everything keyboard-based.