“Inclusivity is NOT Pie” with Bryson Tarbet | 130

Welcome to The Crescendo Music Education Podcast, where we explore the power of music to bring people together and celebrate diversity!

In this episode, I’m thrilled to welcome a very special guest, Bryson—a passionate advocate for inclusivity in the music classroom. Bryson has dedicated his career to ensuring every student, regardless of ability, background, or learning style, feels seen, heard, and valued in the music room.

If you’re ready to learn how to make your music classroom a space where all students can thrive, this is the episode for you. So grab a seat, tune in, and let’s create harmony through inclusion! 🎶

🎶 Find more about Bryson:

• Website
• That Music Podcast
• Instagram
• Facebook

Where to find me:

Crescendo Community Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/crescendocommunityOfficial Crescendo Page: https://www.facebook.com/CrescendoMusicEd/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/CrescendoMusicEdTwitter: https://twitter.com/crescendomusicLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbie-o-shea-62a3741b/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CrescendoDebbie/Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com.au/crescendodebbie/

Introduction

Here is the Crescendo Music Education Podcast – Episode 130.

This podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Turrbal people. I acknowledge them as the traditional owners of the land and pay my respects to elder’s past, present and emerging. They were the first music makers on this land.

If you’d prefer to listen to this episode, click here!

About ‘Read the Episode’: Sometimes, we would rather skim visually than listen to a podcast! That’s a great way to learn too!
The transcript of episode 130 of The Crescendo Music Education Podcast is below.

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Debbie O’Shea 

We are so fortunate today at the Crescendo Music Education Podcast, we have a special guest, a returning guest. In fact, we have Bryson Tarbert. Hello, Bryson.

Bryson Tarbet 

Hello Debbie, thank you so much for having me back.

Debbie O’Shea 

It was lovely. If you’ve missed Bryson’s first episodes you can go back and have a listen and that’s where I present a bio and a bit of background information. So if you’ve been living under a rock and you don’t know Bryson, then go back and have a listen to episode 52 and 53 first. But I was really keen to get you back Bryson. Before we chat, I just wanted to say there were a couple of things I implemented after your podcast episodes that worked really well. Okay, so can I share?

New Features for Bryson

Bryson Tarbet 

I would love you to, I would love to hear.

Debbie O’Shea 

Alright, so the first one was when you talked about having different areas in your room and I certainly don’t feel I have a problem with crafting my lessons so that there’s periods of movement and then we concentrate, then we move over here, we do this song and whatever.

But I don’t have different areas where the children focus. So I have, where my smart board and my whiteboards are on the same wall. Yeah. So I thought I can, surely I can set up a different zone for when we sit. So I actually moved my, for want of another word, story zone where I do the singing books and things.

So I just have a music stand and I made a sign that said Music Book of the Week and it hung in a different sort of corner, it’s not a huge room, but sort of a different corner of the room. And I would put the book on the music stand and I’d put a chair near there so that, it was often at the end. I tend to do that with my younger classes, and then it was time for the story, so we went over and moved to another space. So I didn’t put it in there, because I have a lack of movement, because we do lots of moving, but we didn’t have areas of focus. And I really liked it. It did make a difference.

Bryson Tarbet 

I’m so glad it did. Yeah, I think just giving some different scenery, right? Just mixing it up a little bit, so we’re not just in, either sitting down or standing up. Let’s mix it up. So I love that it worked for you. Because just like you said, when I put it into my classroom, it was a huge game changer. Once I started realising the benefits and like implementing it more and more, it was super huge. So thank you so much for sharing that with me.

Debbie O’Shea 

My pleasure. It’s only a little thing, but it’s not.

Bryson Tarbet 

Yeah, it’s one of those, it’s an easy implementation, but a heavy lift.

Debbie O’Shea 

Oh, oh, that’s a good quote. I like that easy implementation and heavy lift. Love it. And the other thing I did was I’ve had before vague sort of areas. I have a little collection of cushions. Actually I have, surprise, colourful cushions, some are sequined. You know that you can scrape the sequins different ways to get different colours. Donut pillows, they literally look like iced donuts, I don’t know. I just buy these things, and they sort of float around the room and are useful. And I set up a deliberate little quiet nook. It was quite difficult to find one, but I did it, and it was really powerful to just have this tiny, little quiet space full of cushions.

Bryson Tarbet 

I love that. I love that because, again, it’s a small thing, but it can be really big. It can be really huge for those that it’s helpful for. And I think that’s one of those things that, if I were to boil everything I’ve learned about teaching down, is sometimes those really small things can have a really, really big impact.

Debbie O’Shea 

Well I love it, and it did have a big impact on my practice too. Not constant, not every day, every lesson, but when there was that child, you could see they were bubbling, bubbling. And you know what I mean by bubbling? And they’re nearly ready, or we can have a meltdown in a minute. Just go over quietly and just say, Would you like to just sit over there in the little quiet space for a minute? And they’d gather themselves, and it would just save the day, they would go over there. I wanted to share those.

Bryson Tarbet 

I appreciate that.

Debbie O’Shea 

Before we get going, since those first episodes aired, you’ve left the classroom to work on That Music Teacher full time. Now I want to ask how this is feeling, partly because at the time of recording, I have left the classroom and my future is a little undecided at the moment, so I’m curious to know, how does that feel now? How long ago did you leave? And how are you feeling about that decision?

Bryson’s Decision

Bryson Tarbet 

Yeah. I mean, like you said, since the last episode, a lot has gone on. A lot of wonderful things, some things that weren’t so great, but overall just a lot of learning about what the next step was.

So I did leave the classroom at the time of recording about six months ago and it’s been really weird, but it’s been really cool, because I’m now kind of stepped in, really fully into the CEO role of my company, but also really into the instructional coach role. I’ve been working as a clinician and an independent instructional coach, which has been a lot of fun, because I get to have conversations like this every day and be able to, I’m one of those people that I have a million hills that I’m willing to die on and now that I’m doing this full time, I get to kind of shout it off the rooftops a little bit more, which has been really great.

I mean, there’s obviously some growing pains and learning how to work from home and how to, quite frankly, how to deal with the identity that I’m currently not a public school teacher and how that impacts me. But for me, it’s been great. I have a three year old foster son, so being able to take off whenever I need to, or rearrange my schedule when he inevitably gets the daycare flu has been really nice and it’s been really good for me so far. And what my favourite part is, is just being able to connect with so many more music educators, because I have so much more time to put into this, which is something that is not lost on me and is incredibly humbling every time we get to do an event or anything like that.

Debbie O’Shea 

Wow. So you talked about coaching. I mean, I see on the internet the sorts of things you’re doing publicly with That Music Teacher, what’s the coaching arm? What’s that about?

Bryson Tarbet 

Yeah, so this is brand new. I’m kind of currently beta testing. I have four teachers from around North America that I am coaching on a one to one basis, being able to just, kind of basically, what an instructional coach would be if your district actually provided one. A lot of them here, at least in the United States, a lot of districts will have literacy coaches and maybe even math coaches. But it’s rather unheard of, unless you’re in a really, really big district to have a music instructional coach. So I’ve kind of framed as the instructional coach in your pocket, being that music expert to help figure out how to make the music classroom for everyone. And that’s kind of my big goal in this life is, when we say music is for everyone, is to really do the work so that we mean it.

Debbie O’Shea 

Okay, so you’re helping those individual people, so they could come to you and go, I have child X who I’m just really struggling. They have these sort of behaviours. What can I try? So it’s actually helping individual people with their own students?

Bryson Tarbet 

Yeah, and that’s pretty cool. That’s something that the magic is not lost on me for that. And that’s one of those things that’s really lighting me up lately.

Debbie O’Shea 

That is magic, that is amazing, because I just know that there are a lot of teachers struggling with inclusion. I’m going to do air quotes again “inclusion” because obviously I’m in Australia not in America, but we are getting more and more students in our schools that would have been 10 years ago, 20 years ago, they would have been in special schools. Well, that’s what we call them here.

The schools for the high needs students, but they’re now being placed in our mainstream system. The issue is they often arrive without adequate support. We don’t have the proportion of teachers to students that they would have got in a special school. I don’t know if you call them special schools, so I hope I’m not offending anyone. That’s just what they were called here. It’s very hard to speak generally, but apart from giving us advice to find the funds to actually provide proper inservice and support, because I know sometimes, your teacher aid support is soaked up completely by the needs of these few and you want to help them.

But there are also other students who need help and there are other teachers who need help. So apart from giving us a bucket of money for extra PD, because I’m sure part of the answer is upskilling yourself, and part of the answer would be more resources so we could work on the upskilling, difficult to get more money. What sort of advice could you give us, and perhaps that would lead us into the new framework that I hear tell of, your domains of accessibility? So that’s a really big question.

Domains of Accessibility

Bryson Tarbet 

Yeah, I mean, so this is kind of my life’s work. My life, at least professionally, is creating more accessible music classrooms. I spent my first year out of undergrad working in a special ed setting as an aid and that really started my graduate research line into Universal Design for Learning and right now, my most popular speaking gig that I do is all about inclusion through that elementary lens. And the reason being is just like you said, teachers want to have inclusive classrooms. They want students to be successful.

They don’t have the resources, the training or the support in order to do it. And the big thing that I hear a lot of is exactly what you said, which is, I want to help Johnny, but I don’t know how to help Johnny without making the rest of the class completely, like I don’t know how to do both. And I think that’s something where, clearly there are systemic issues that need to be solved. Clearly, especially if both the United States and Australia, as far apart as we can be, are having similar issues.

Clearly there are bigger issues. But what I think the first thing we can do is focus on what we can control, while also kind of putting some pressure on the broken systems, but also focusing on the actionable. And that’s where I develop these domains of accessibility. Working with the teachers that I’ve been working with is basically, I come to realise, especially having gone through a lot of work with universal design for learning. And we talk about removing barriers. And I think removing barriers for students to access the curriculum is huge.

It’s very important and it’s so needed. But we don’t talk enough about figuring out what those barriers are. And the reality is until we identify those barriers, we can’t do anything to break them down. So that’s where the domain of accessibility came from, which is essentially five areas of focus to where we might be setting our students up for failure, or maybe that’s a little rough, maybe we’re not best setting them up for success, or some ways that there might be barriers in the classroom to kind of focus in what we’re looking at. So it’s not super overwhelming, at least.

Debbie O’Shea 

That makes a lot of sense, because, like you said, we’d all be in favour, yeah, break down the barriers in what? What are the barriers exactly before we can work on how to break them down. So I think identification of the barriers. Step one, love it. And then you can look at, okay, How can I navigate this so that every child can get through. Can you briefly tell us what are these, five did you say?

Bryson Tarbet 

Okay, yeah. So the five domains of accessibility are just five areas of focus, and they are sensory accessibility, language accessibility, physical accessibility, cognitive accessibility and social emotional accessibility. So essentially, those are the things that when we’re trying to find barriers we should remove. Those are kind of like the lenses that we should look at our classrooms through.

Debbie O’Shea 

Oh, I love that. And I love the way that you talk about lens, because I think that’s very powerful. I think how we look at things, that affects our whole reality, so therefore our students’ reality. So do you want to just, I’m trying to make my computer allow me to write these down. All right, can you tell us again I’m going to write them down.

Bryson Tarbet 

So we have sensory accessibility. We have language accessibility, physical accessibility, cognitive accessibility and social emotional accessibility.

Debbie O’Shea 

Now some of those look a little easier than others I imagine. I shouldn’t say, yeah I shouldn’t say easier. But we can tackle them more easily.

Tackling Accessibility

Bryson Tarbet 

Yeah, I think that some of them are ones that we’ve kind of been talking about more, so they’re kind of a little we feel like we might, even if we haven’t started really doing the heavy work, we might have some ideas in our pocket that we can pull out. But the reality is a lot of these are going to be overlapping, and the cool thing about removing barriers is sometimes you remove one barrier and it’s actually like five barriers you didn’t even notice. So when we start with doing the work and pulling from them, we can help with sensory and language at the same time, which is pretty cool right?

Debbie O’Shea 

So some of them are fairly obvious, at least to start with. And I think as music teachers, we are already tackling, like physical, we tackle. We bought some chord changers for ukulele so  they can press a button instead. So there are physical changes, the child that doesn’t have their fine motor skills or missing fingers, they can play on xylophone instead of recorder. There’s things that we do because physical is a little more obvious, sensory, even sensory, we’re starting to do that more with headphones, fidgets, though can I make a little confession about fidget toys.

They sort of drive me a little bit nuts, because when I think I’m not to the point, because you’ve talked about this I think in your last episodes, that if they’re available, kids get used to them being there and will only use them when they need them. And I think perhaps I haven’t got to that point, because there are some classes that will arrive and this huge percentage of the kids have these fidget toys and they’re just sitting playing with them.

I’m like we’re going to clap our hands now, we need to not have your fidget toy. I just think we’ve got to be careful they don’t get in the way of the learning, even though I understand there are some real needs for them, I’ve seen some children that need to have that, and they need to have the chewy thing around their neck so they’re not eating their shirts. And I know that we need those sensory toys, but I’m just saying, in reality, sometimes they might be a little overused. Now, is that bad for me to say that?

Bryson Tarbet 

That is a hugely common thing that I see and I do want to kind of talk about that, because I myself, I have ADHD and sensory processing disorder. So sensory issues are something that I’ve been acutely aware of as I started realising more and more about my own diagnosis. Now with fidgets, I will say, first of all, I have sensory disorders. So sometimes I’m just on edge. So sometimes I would literally say to my kids, hey, I’m really sorry, but I can’t focus because there’s too much going on. Can we put these away? But I also think that there’s a time and a place for fidgets, just like, I use fidgets.

I would have one I could show you, but my three year old must have grabbed it, that I have with me when I’m working. But the reality is, if I’m typing, I’m not going to be using my fidget because I need both hands, but when I’m just kind of scrolling, then I need it. So there are times where, for instance, in my classroom, if we had fidgets and we were going to do a hand clapping game or a play party or something, I would say, All right, go put the fidgets back in the box and make a long way set. And my students understood that they don’t get to have them all the time.

There’s just so many opportunities. For instance, if we were going to be working at the chalkboard they can have a fidget while we’re working. And I think it’s okay to set those expectations with your students, hold them to those expectations with your students, hold them to those expectations, but also realise that your expectations might be different than mine, and that they might change depending on situations of the classroom. And I think that’s something that is totally okay to put some guardrails around.

Debbie O’Shea 

I like that. Yes. Think of it as just the expectations and the guardrails. Yes, I love that. The social emotional. Can you tell us a bit about that one?

Social-Emotional Accessibility

Bryson Tarbet 

Yeah, that’s one that I learned very quickly in my career because, unfortunately, I had a lot of students that came from a lot of trauma, they come from parents who are addicted to drugs. There’s just a lot of stuff going on at home. And I think that we talk a lot about students bringing in baggage into our classrooms, but the reality is, like that’s there and acknowledging that they have trauma is not the hard part.

We have to do something with that information. We need to make sure that we’re being trauma sensitive and we’re just being aware that the way trauma can be, it literally changes the brain. So we need to be aware of our reactions and interactions with students and understand that it might be different and we just need to be aware of it. I think that’s something that, once you have this kind of lens to look through of social emotional which is, how do our students feel supported? Do our students feel like they belong in our classroom? Do our students feel like they are physically and emotionally safe? That is a huge thing, especially when we’re talking about children, especially young children, especially children that have experienced trauma.

Debbie O’Shea 

So would a lot of removing barriers that are the social emotional ones, because that is a hard one, listening to what you’re saying would some of this, or a lot of this, I’m thinking, come down to your relationship with the child?

Bryson Tarbet 

I think it can. I think obviously building a relationship. Unfortunately, that is another weaponised phrase in education, but it’s important and I think that the reality is kind of, in this domain, it’s more than just knowing the kid and having the kid knowing you. It’s being aware of the language we’re using. Maybe their parents are incarcerated, so maybe they’re not living with mum and dad. Maybe because of their trauma, they have really bad anxiety, so having something like a visual schedule, or just like this is kind of what we’re gonna be doing today, or even just being very clear that there might be a surprise and kind of using those needs.

And what I love about it is it actually covers a lot of the other domains. For instance, a visual schedule can be really helpful for students who are autistic or on the spectrum. And I think that’s something that you’ll start noticing a lot, once we identify the barriers, it’s actually one big barrier that we can apply, one adaptation or modification and it can break it down for a lot of the students in our population.

Debbie O’Shea 

And language, are you referring to children that are language delayed or English as a second language, or all of the above?

Bryson Tarbet 

Everything. All of the above. Obviously, if you have students, I had a lot of students that were from Spanish speaking homes, or were learning English. When they got to school was the first time they were exposed to English. But there’s also things like having a speech delay, or using a talker app on an iPad, or even me, sometimes I have language processing issues, so just physically hearing the words, it takes me a little bit longer sometimes to kind of piece the pieces together. So all of those things are kind of in there, especially when we think, the language processing, it might be a little less known to some people.

But if we think about students who are speaking to us in a second or a different language, they have to hear it in the second language, they are likely translating it back into their primary language in their brain, then they have to come up with a response, then they have to translate it back.

And all of that takes time and if we are constantly giving them more information or asking more questions without even giving them time to respond, that’s a big one, so just a huge thing in that language accessibility domain is just give time. Give time to process. Don’t feel like we need to repeat the question. Give them some time to come up with the answer and then maybe they’ll be able to do a response, or maybe they might need more information. But just hammering questions isn’t going to help anyone.

Debbie O’Shea 

Okay, giving, just giving time. And you know, the other thing that’s popping into my head as we’re talking through some of these and it actually pops into my head every single time I do anything about inclusion and udl and all of those things, is that any changes we make to help specific children access the music curriculum and our content actually helps everybody.

Bryson Tarbet 

Yeah, and that’s one of those big things where I wish I could get more people to understand that, because we focus so much on, Jack is having a full on meltdown and I had to clear the room again. How is that fair to the other students? Or how is that even fair to Jack? But the reality is, if we can make a series of small changes so that we can reduce Jack’s escalation, or even completely remove his escalation. Maybe it’s not one thing.

Maybe it’s not just a sensory need. Maybe it’s a sensory need and a social emotional need. Maybe there’s a lot of things that are compounded. But as we start adding these things and removing these tiny barriers, we start inching away and kind of breaking away these bigger barriers that can get in the way of everyone. And I think that the reality is, when we implement strategies to increase our inclusivity, there’s very rarely any negative impact on the other students. I tell the story a lot. When I was in high school, we had two main wings in the school, so we had to go up from one, and there was a height difference because of, just like, I don’t know the ground, but instead of putting stairs in, they just put a really long ramp.

And that helps students who are in wheelchairs. That helps when they have to move pianos up there for soul and ensemble. That helps if someone breaks their leg. If I’m just really not feeling like going to class and I’m just kind of slumping along, that would help me on that day.

And the reality is, even if that wasn’t the intention, it still helped me on that day. Another good example is, the over the ear headphones, which I think is a huge thing that we can do in our classrooms. But maybe I bought those for students with sensory needs, but maybe Monica has a migraine that day, so she wants to put on headphones, and that’s a way to help her. And I think you bring up a really, really good point that I wish people would understand more, is that when we do this right, we’re making it better for everyone by also making it so much more inclusive for this one student.

If we can learn anything else on this episode, it doesn’t have to be us versus them. That’s not how this works. Inclusivity is not pie. When someone else gets more, we don’t get less. It’s just access. Everyone will have access to what’s going on in the classroom. And that’s the important thing.

Debbie O’Shea 

I love it. Inclusivity is not pie, that’s captured it, that is fabulous. And it sounds to me too, like some of this comes back to just good pedagogy, good teaching skills. Like, if you’re looking at cognitive as one of your areas there, to help the child, oh, and maybe physical as well. So like, I do less pencil and paper, I still think it’s important to include pencil and paper, right? I’m not chucking it out, but I do a bit less now.

I have noticed that some children really do struggle because of fine motor, maybe because of cognitive function, like that’s quite a high order thing to do these tiny little ta’s and titi’s on a bit of paper, and I’ll use whiteboards and paddle pop sticks and like I’ve always done that sort of thing, because that, to me, is just good teaching, so that as an inclusive practice, it’s helping those kids with cognitive function that don’t understand one and two sounds on a beat.

But if I’m putting things on a plate, a paper plate that represents a beat, and I’m putting two things on it, then perhaps that’s getting to me on a cognitive level, that doing symbols on the whiteboard doesn’t. So partly I’m thinking that good educational practice with appropriate manipulatives and a variety of ways to approach different content is actually also breaking down barriers.

Bryson Tarbet 

Yeah and that’s it. The whole point of teaching is to pass on knowledge. And to pass skills and to pass experiences. And teaching is the act of making that hopefully as easy as we can, just like you said, when we have accessibility, and we make these decisions to be accessible, they’re often just the foundations of good teaching. And that’s what I love having conversations about things like Kodály and Orff and just play based learning and this that and the other thing is, nine times out of ten they’re just all based on the same foundations that we know as teachers work.

They’re just showing it in a different way, and maybe with more or less research than we had before. But the reality is, good teaching will always be good teaching. But that doesn’t mean we can do something forever and never try anything new, because that’s when we get stuck, that’s when we get complacent, and that’s when we stop paying attention to the barriers that are around us.

Debbie O’Shea 

I love that. I love that very much Bryson. There’s so many gems in there. Before we leave, I would like to just quickly look at the impact that you’re having on our profession. I know mainly of the Elementary Music Summit in January,  which thank you so much for allowing me to be part of that. There must be a lot of work behind that. Can you tell us a little bit about the experience of building those events over the years? And obviously it must be relatively successful for you to be able to spend more time on it now. And I know you’ve touched on this, and then we can finish with you telling everyone the best place to connect with you.

Bryson’s Impact

Bryson Tarbet 

I’ve done a lot of thinking about this company, because I had no intention of ever starting a business or leaving teaching, but here we are. But it has been magical, honestly. I mean, we’ve definitely had our ups and our downs, but I’m so thankful that I get to impact classrooms all over the world, and just being able to to think about the exponential impact of, we get one teacher here that has how many hundreds of students over their entire career. And that is not lost on me. That is something that I have very few words to actually put into words how I feel about that.

I’m so thankful that I have a wonderful team that supports me and the mission of our company to create things like the Elementary Music Summit, which quite frankly, is a lot of work, but it is a labour of love and it is so much fun. And who knows what That Music Teacher will look like in 10 years, but my mission, or our mission, is just to, we have our values as a company that we came up with, which is inclusivity matters, community empowerment matters and music education matters.

And that’s really our goal, is how can we spread that mission, scream it from the rooftops and above anything else, get content specific professional development in front of the teachers that need it, and we’re just going to keep on doing that and see where it takes us.

Debbie O’Shea 

That is magic. I love those values, perfect. That is amazing. So do people go to your website and where do you like hanging out the most?

Bryson Tarbet 

Yeah, you can head on over to thatmusicteacher.com, that’s our kind of main website for all the things. We hang out on Facebook technically, but the real part is over on Instagram. That’s where we hang out most @thatmusicteacher. But I love being able to connect with other teachers, so feel free to send me a DM, and we can continue this conversation, because it is something that is super important to me, and I can’t talk enough about it.

Debbie O’Shea 

That is absolutely magic. You’ve given us some gems. I love it. Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about? I don’t want to cut you off if there was something else you really wanted to say.

Bryson Tarbet 

I guess I would be remiss if I didn’t just say, take the first step. Making changes like this can be really tricky, because you’re going to fall on your face a few times, especially when it comes to inclusivity and breaking down barriers and differentiation and all that fun stuff that we know we need to do, but we’re just not sure where to start. Just take the first step and then take the second, and then just keep on going, and all of a sudden you’ll look back and you’re a mile away. And it really is one of those things where it is a long journey, but it is such an important journey, and it’s a really cool journey to be able to kind of look back on where you’ve come from and the success of the students that are with you along the way.

Debbie O’Shea 

That is a perfect place to finish. Thank you so much for joining us. Bryson.

Bryson Tarbet 

Thank you so much for having me.

Sign-Off

Thank you for joining me for this podcast. Don’t forget, you’ll find the show notes and transcript and all sorts of information on crescendo.com.au. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast or found it valuable, you might like to rate it on your podcast player and leave a review. I’d really appreciate it if you did. All I can be as the best version of me. All you can do is be the best you. Until next time, bye.

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