Teacher Training Program for Dancers

Welcome to our 9-part series, where we share a teaching framework to help you create classes that include the full complexity, beauty and history of the dance you teach.

In these videos, you’ll get to dig deep into how to craft classes that help your students build a powerful compass that will guide them, so they can continuously develop as dancers who positively contribute to the development of the dance.

When we learn a dance, we actually don’t learn the dance itself. We learn our understanding of what we are interacting with. This understanding we’ve formed (and are continuously refining) is called a “mental representation”. Our mental representation might, or might not, map well with what the dance really is. In this lecture we walk you through the concepts we need to understand as dance teachers in order to better recognise what distinguishes a great teacher from the rest.

How to Set Goals Using our Mental Models Imagine your mental model consists of a beautifully shaped artwork with various grooves and shapes, and that you want to share your understanding of this shape to the best of your ability. How can you describe it to someone who has no picture of it? How do you help them form a useful mental representation of the dance? This video helps you understand this and much more.

Using examples is a straightforward and great way to let our students explore different structures. Examples can come in the form of stories, fun moves, inspiring video clips, and so on. In this lesson we’re introducing how to think about examples and what to steer away from. In other lessons we’ll expand further; for instance in our lesson on Flow and Class Design we will understand much more concretely how we design examples.

A 5-step process to create effective teaching models.

How can we decide what to teach in a dance class? What do we want our students to care about? One of the most important starting points for us is to figure out what it is we want our students to care about - not just for one class, but as values they wish to achieve and uphold as dancers. In other words, what do we teach in order to help them form a mental representation that will best serve them and the future of the dance? To understand this idea we want to explore how our students’ worldviews are created, and the "Box" concept.

In this lecture you'll learn how you can think about what goals to communicate with your students, how much time to allocate for each task and what kind of feedback to give when.

In this lecture you'll learn about how the teaching and learning process can give you the feedback you need for continuous improvement.

In this series we’ve delved deep into our understanding of what it means to learn a dance and how we can go about teaching it to our students. The biggest insight we want you to take away from this lesson is the importance of the relationship we form with the dance. What we choose to teach strongly affects how our students understand the dance; designing classes that deliberately aim to help our students form a useful understanding of the whole dance, and not just the material they are learning at that moment, is crucial.