Building a repertoire of easy instructions & getting the optimal teaching tempo in class

Описание: Check out the program here: https://swingstep.com/teacher

Question part 1: "Building a repertoire of easy instructions where I feel secure and comfortable teaching them."

We used to use package all our knowledge into small "blueprints." A blueprint could be a specific concept around how we think about a "turn" in the dance, "rhythm," or anything else. It created the core building blocks of the dance for us. So whenever we were teaching a new move, we started with teaching the blueprints needed for that move and used them to prepare the students. What worked really well was that the students learned the core technique for a move and thus could actually directly also learn many more moves that use the same technique. As they understood the core element, the rest was just applications. However, we've stopped using this approach for ourselves because we've learned that it is not as compatible with other important Black American values from which the dance we teach comes. For example, the blueprints established a mindset that "this is the way to do it" instead of "our way of doing it" or "this is A way of doing it.

But there is a downside to tapping into our repertoire of easy instructions too often. And that is that we miss out on many opportunities to be vulnerable in front of our students and explore new ideas with them. This creates a whole other experience in class. This is why we recommend that you consider 20% of your teaching time as moments where you step away from your comfort zone and take yourself and your students into unexplored territory. This will also help you develop other skills such as handling your and your students' distress without providing solutions. For example, using active listening to deflate tension even though you can't. Sometimes, you don't want to provide a solution for strategic reasons and just help your students deal with their distress constructively. In Lesson 7 https://swingstep.com/courses/lesson-..., we go into this in quite a lot of detail. To get you started on such journeys, you can introduce sentences such as "I'm not really sure how I want us to work on this, let's try this …" in our experience, the students are immediately engaged and want to try it with us to see if this thing can work. The engagement level is very high at that moment, creating a lovely moment.

Question part 2: "as well as getting a feeling of the correct teaching tempo."

There is an excellent answer to this… wait for it…

Ask your students!

We often come back to the power of this approach. When in doubt, or even if there is no doubt, ask your students to get their perspectives to consider when making your decisions. But also, it gives your students a sense of being heard and even feeling in control of the progression and how much novelty or progress they can handle.

A simple way is to ask your students to show you with their thumbs up, down, or in the middle about how ready they are to move on. Up would mean "very ready to move on," the middle could mean "medium ready - a little more practice would be great," and down would tell "I'm not ready at all." Each time you are about to move on to the next topic, do this quick check so that you have one more source of input to calibrate your decision on.

There are a lot of different ways we can deal with input. Sometimes we change our plans because of the information, and sometimes, we don't. It's important to recognize that understanding and to agree are not the same.

There is another concept we like to use that helps us "get the feeling of the correct teaching tempo." And that has to do with helping our students manage their expectations about progress. For this, we instill in our students the concept we call: "Fail Forward." Note: we don't want to take credit for inventing this concept, as learning through failure is core to the modern understanding of learning.

We communicate with our students what we expect the learning process to be all about not getting it "right" until you gradually do. Failure is embedded in the path toward success and integration of the new movements. Thus, for our students to explicitly have this permission to not get it right while they are learning the movement releases a lot of tension. We help them understand that they will start with just getting a rough idea of the movement and improve it over time. They are often willing to go further even if it is not perfect, knowing that those refinements will come later, whether in the same or another class. If you have that approach when you ask questions like "are you happy to move on or not?" They are often more balanced with their answer. They can say, "I'm not perfect, but I can move on" because they'll learn that we will come back to this to improve over time rather than worrying about not getting it the first time.

Find us here:
Instagram:   / swingstepdance  
Facebook:   / swingstepdance