This is one of my favorite teaching strategies too – not just in tap. I’m not a lover of counting (though because some students do respond to it better, I try to offer both). “Singing” the rhythms and phrasing encourages feeling the music and in general taps into people’s more innate sense of rhythm & music.

Writing it down overlaps into notation but, in this case I think writing it is more mental rehearsal. Like you, gypsy, I do the writing when I get home (when it’s fresh). My notes have the added bonus of being able to reference them if need be, but it’s generally not notation that I would be able to recreate a dance from, say, a year later. The act of writing adds a physical and visual element to my mental rehearsal which seems to help me remember better in the moment, even though I don’t have the paper in front of me.

It’s struck me as odd, that in many instructional materials – dvds, that they don’t contain a “dancer’s eye view” – that the learner has to themselves transcode a 3rd person perspective to a 1st person perspective. It’s good to see how it is from the outside – but seeing what it looks like from the inside so to speak presumably could really help also – in terms of using visualisation for retaining muscle memory, and going through a routine in the mind’s eye.

For me – and i’m still a beginner at this – in part it’s chaining, linking the moves together – in the memory learning field – this is akin to having to rather than remember separate things, link these together (the use of points on a specific known route is one technique, where at each point on this remembered walk, a fact, person, or thing can be attached to it, to thus have them in order).