#teaching dance

Let’s talk about teaching philosophies.

It has taken me years of training and teaching to come into my own. If you’ve read this far, you must understand that as a young dancer growing up, I was pushed to my limit and then some. While I was training to be a professional dancer, I found myself at the end of my ropes time and time again. Overworked, burned out, and beaten down. Not to mention the psychological trauma of it all too. 

Going to college allowed me to push the reset button on my training, and therein I found a fresh start. I was supported, encouraged and enlightened to be my best version with the most efficient of practices. I didn’t have to push myself past my ceiling of mental and physical capacity. I was allowed to let out the giant exhale I had been holding in for the past 18 years of my life. This propelled me into my young career post grad, which meant teaching dance. 

As I made my way into studio environments, I saw a lot of the same red flags I had personally grown up with in dance: long hours at the studio, constant fatigue and nagging injuries. And this was all happening to children 18 years and under. I knew something had to change, for the well-being of these young dancers. 

Now under equal positive and negative influence from my instructors, I knew forcing results is not ideal. It’s important for a dancer to not only understand the basic fundamentals of their dance technique, but how to efficiently move through it as well. I developed my own curriculum within my classes to properly progress the students in class. We would go from point A to point B to point C and so on. This would mean moving the class at a measured pace. We would be working on the same steps and concepts of movement for weeks to a month at a time, sometimes longer if the class needed extra practice. This idea doesn’t sit well with some studio owners, and particularly some parents. 

Let me tell you about the first group of parents who were visibly upset and confused by my teaching methods. Let’s call them The Susans. Now The Susans were a group of moms to their  4-5 years old children. They were all competitive students and I was their Ballet teacher, who they saw twice a week. Seeing as they took about 5 other classes for technique, and outside rehearsals for their competition dances, I figured what they needed was a slower paced class to focus on the fundamentals of their technique. After all, they needed to learn not only the “what” of their dancing but also the “how”. 

We would do simple exercises in the center, very little at the barre, and work on repetitive movements rather than complex sequences. What I looked forward to the most, was the fact I was going to start with a group of dancers this young and build healthy training habits early. This elated me because the older students I worked with, we toiled to weed out the bad habits and try to start fresh while still training. That wasn’t the case with these girls. My managers and fellow coworkers could see the benefit of what I was trying to do with these kids, and would go to bat for me consistently. The only group of people who had a problem were The Susans. 

They would hover outside the classroom, stare down their children and often grimace at what we were doing in class. They would ask questions after every class, which I had no problem with. I’d rather be transparent with you to let you know my methods of teaching and how I like to manage my class, pedagogically speaking. This never seemed to be enough for them to understand though. In their eyes, they wanted to see results right away. I mean, how could you? When you watch every single class week after week, you only see the slow progress working as it should. They would go straight to my managers to complain, although no action was ever taken on me because I had the full support of this company. True helicopter dance mom fashion for The Susans.

They eventually came around and could see after a year of training, their children improved their technique and continued to grow on these quality habits. They would compliment and praise my teachings at this point. While I wished I didn’t have to go through the headache of this first year training these kids, I’m glad they could see what these children gained in these ballet classes. But this is perhaps where I see the end of my studio teaching career. 

I believe I thrive in environments where I am encouraged to teach my students the way I see fit, and I feel my philosophy just doesn’t match with a studio environment, generally speaking. While most studios have changed to be more progressive in health-conscious ways, not all of them embrace it with open arms. It will always feel like an uphill battle to me, and I’m not going to give up on my professional ethics to fit in with any dance school. I’ve not only seen great results with my pedagogical practices, but great processes too. I have the power to turn my students into hard-working, curious, intelligent and mindful dancers.