Students enrolled in special education programs often navigate their educational environment with targeted domain areas, goals, and skill areas identified as benefitting from additional support to develop. These skill areas typically fall within social, emotional, cognitive, communication, physical, and academic domain areas. Many students within special education programs have their strengths and areas benefiting from additional support documented within an Individualized Education Plan – or IEP – which guides the student’s educational process and ensures their educational environment is providing accommodations and modifications essential to that student’s ability to navigate their educational program.

In the school setting, a music therapist creates student-centered, music-based interventions as a clinical tool for facilitating the development of targeted skills. The music therapist creates intentional, goal-driven musical experiences customized to meet a specific student, group, or classroom’s identified areas of need, and completes progress monitoring on an ongoing basis through data collection. A music therapist may provide an IEP service, meaning music therapy is listed as a “related service” on the student’s IEP and the therapist is basing all therapeutic interventions and data collection off of the goal areas on the IEP. A music therapist may also operate as a consultant to an educational team member (school psychologist, music educators, classroom teacher) and/or as an embedded push-in curriculum service, meaning group music therapy program is a classroom-wide experience that all students have access to on an ongoing basis.