Tips

This page is for pedagogy tips, articles and ideas as well as answer FAQs.  This month we feature advice for dance educators from our SI participants.

The following is a list of advice from twenty-one dance educators who gathered for the Summer Institute reunion meeting January 30, 2010.   These professionals teach children with and without disabilities preK through high school, in public schools and afterschool programs, in the classroom, the dance room and physical education.  As a group, we are dance specialists, adaptive physical education teachers and classroom teachers.  All of us teach standards-based curriculum, some emphasizing improvisation, others integrating the modules required from their school district, still others incorporating traditional forms and popular genres.  Collectively, we ran the gamut of the professionals who teach dance. Collectively, we will teach ongoing classes to 24,753 children this year!

When asked to name one piece of advice for new dance educators, here’s what they said:

  • Allow time to build partnerships
  • Allow time to explore an idea
  • Teach fewer concepts with more depth
  • Teach from love
  • Establish rituals for the beginning and end of class
  • Get organized
  • Establish a signal meaning “stop” that students understand and comply with
  • “Show me with your bodies, not your mouth”
  • Post visual support of learning
  • Document
  • Go with the kids
  • Get professional development (PD) for yourself
  • Take PD that allows you to experience the dance curriculum yourself
  • Advocate for dance with your peers
  • Take many “trips” across the floor to set up for creative dancing
  • Use many modalities
  • Give opportunities for free dancing at the end as an award
  • Pay attention
  • Plan without attachment
  • Ask classroom teacher to find and name student leaders
  • Trust your own expertise