Introducing music therapy into the school doesn't mean adding new teaching strategies to manage a crisis. Rather, it means recovering the dialogic dimension that lies at the heart of education itself: the meeting between teacher and student, student and student, student and class. It's about drawing the entire group into a single narrative process activated by sound itself.
Sound and its dynamics mobilize the resources through which we learn. Teachers and students, growing aware of how we relate to sound, naturally turn toward searching for meaning. The choices students make are real ones, grounded in their own specific reasons.
When a teacher uses music this way, something surprising happens: students stop being passive listeners. They discover that being a student doesn't mean sitting in silence.
This approach asks each teacher to support the others and deepens the professional skills already present. Students sense that there's room for them to be protagonists, space for their own selves to emerge.
The rigorous, creative teacher watches closely—observing the shifting moments of attention and creative energy in each student—and uses those observations to shape what happens next, to read the room, and to form new working hypotheses.
Writing and Spontaneous Movement
The Method
The actual exercise unfolds through three distinct moments of learning to think through listening to the same piece of music.
Each moment carries a different task:
- Listen to the music and draw lines on paper, following the impulse of your own spontaneous movement.
- In the second listening, insert words freely into the network of lines you've already created—whatever comes to mind.
- In the third listening, group the words you've written according to your own logic.
Working three times with the same piece of music helps every student "bring order to the chaos" created in their consciousness "by the multitude of sensations the world has given them." Maria Montessori wrote that "we wrongly believe the child with the most toys is the most developed," when in fact "the disordered multitude of objects only burdens the mind with fresh chaos"—much like the bombardment of sound today's students face, in which it becomes hard to find your way.
These three moments of individual work are followed by a group phase: students read aloud what they've written and share it with the class.
In Practice
During the "field testing" phase of the training program, the activity was carried out in two very different classroom settings by two teachers who had already tried it themselves.
Elisa and Her Class (7th grade)
Elisa is partially sighted with severe difficulty moving her arms. She sits in a wheelchair and communicates through sounds. She's drawn to vivid colors and shows joy when people sing or play music. Her class is welcoming and has strong academic engagement.
Daniele and the "Chaotic" Class (9th grade)
Daniele, a disabled student in this class, attends sporadically and is hyperactive; he can read and write. He's in a loud, chaotic classroom with relational problems and low academic achievement. Some students need close adult supervision.
New Energy
Elisa drives her own communication. She leads the interaction and tells the teacher what to do; the teacher follows her direction.
This happens within a class where everyone is working on the same task. Repeating the three listening sequences gives her a chance to reshape her own emotional energy and become an organizing force for the entire class.
Through the emotions the music stirs in her, Elisa generates a wide range of movements that create real communication. Her teacher doesn't give orders but adapts to what Elisa is communicating—she attunes herself to Elisa without losing herself in the process.
As spontaneous movement takes shape, Elisa develops an expressive way of moving that belongs to her alone. She takes on an exploratory quality that shows up across all three listenings, each time more distinctly. The teacher's presence creates "a frame"—a safe ground from which to explore. You might say a shared language is beginning to form among Elisa, the teacher, and the class.
Through this experience, Elisa grasps something crucial: the chance to "shift her energy." That energy—already present in her, latent—lets her strengthen her non-verbal language. She expresses herself, and in doing so, she changes how the teacher and the class see her.
The students in the chaotic classroom gradually begin to feel less like they're on a leash. They start asking the teacher to do the exercise again.
They begin to sense that better relationships are possible, that the teacher genuinely cares and actually listens. Something shifts—logically and emotionally—and real thoughts, real feelings, real worries, recent hurts begin to surface. Different kids emerge, surprising even the teacher who knows them. Having room to tell their own story through the three musical listenings opens up something emancipatory: students start to climb back toward "the reasons for their own actions, to understand and correct them." They discover each has their own life project but must account for others. The chaotic students now have space to reflect on themselves: they take stock of what they can do, adjust their behavior, look honestly at their own lived experience.
(The full experience, titled "Music Therapy in School Context for Inclusive Dialogue: Writing Mechanics and Metacognitive Teaching," was documented and published by the facilitator and two teacher-participants in L'Integrazione Scolastica e Sociale, vol. 15, no. 2, EricKson, Trento, May 2016.) OL
Bruno Galante, 2017