Why Does My Dance Teacher Make Me Go Slowly?

Do you ever feel like your teacher is making you practice things painfully slow?

Maybe you are a dance student who just loves to move at a fast pace and find it difficult to slow down. Perhaps you are eager to try the more advanced or faster version and don’t like it when your dance instructor holds you back.

Possibly it annoys you. You wonder what’s wrong with you or what’s wrong with your teacher that you have to work through things so slowly. Maybe you even begin to think he or she is just being mean or controlling. Perhaps you want to scream,

“Why are we going so slowly?!?”

Speaking as a teacher, let me tell you your feelings are very normal. I’ve seen that frustration in the eyes of students plenty of times. It is unlikely that your teacher is making you go slowly to be mean or controlling. Cross my heart, it’s true!

Why does your teacher want you to take things slow?

To improve your skills as a dancer!

How does going slower and taking time to advance or move on help you improve? There are a number of ways:

It helps you move with clarity (clear, crisp, articulate)

If your teacher is asking you to slow down, he may see that something could be cleaner and wants to help you master the movement.

Think of it this way: if you fill out the answers on a quiz as fast as you can, you may get a lot of them right but there are details you may have missed or questions you misunderstood because you did not take your time. If you never slow down to soak up the details, you might take the test again and again and never get a 100 percent.

The same is true for your movement. Going fast, you might be missing important stuff. Working slowly means you have time to get the hang of the skill, or pattern, or pathway. This makes 100% possible at any speed!

It encourages you to have good body sense

Common sense is showing awareness and good judgment in everyday situations. Body sense is showing awareness and good judgment concerning the body.

Working slowly gives you time to pay more attention to what you are doing (see above) and also how you are doing it. You feel the muscles working more and, with your teacher as a guide, you can figure out or sense when something is not working or needs adjusting. You will learn to understand and “listen” to your own body. This listening skill will save you from injury and will help you to move in a more coordinated and organized way overall.

(Teacher’s note: Check these articles on the health benefits of moving slowly and the relationship between good body sense and athletic/academic performance)

It allows you to practice and develop control, which you’ll need as a dancer (even when moving fast)

Control in dance is having the power to direct or choose the way you move your body.

You are in the driver’s seat when you can move in a way that looks wild and out of control without losing track of where your body is in space. You are in control when, instead of needing to come down from your double pirouette, you choose to land it (see a famous dancer make that choice after an undecuple pirouette – that’s 11 of ‘em – in this video).

Fast or slow, having control over your body takes physical strength. But when you are moving quickly it is easier to “hide” any weakness, even from yourself. For example, falling out of a super fast spin can look and feel like a choice if you snatch that landing. And your balance as you promenade on one leg feels less wobbly if you move quickly around.

Going slowly keeps you from cheating yourself, allowing you to build your strength. It also helps you learn the difference between making a choice and making the best of whatever is going on. (It’s not that there’s something wrong with making the best of things, that is an important skill too, but it is always nice to have the power to choose.)

If you can do a movement with clarity, awareness, and control slowly, doing it fast will come more naturally!

That may answer your questions about moving slowly, but what about advancing slowly?

Why would a dance teacher “hold you back?”

So that you can move forward with confidence.

“Learning ballet is like learning geometry. You begin with the first theorem, master it, and then go on to the next. If you haven’t learned to solve the first problem, you won’t be able to tackle the one that follows.” ~ Fernando Alonso, Dance Magazine

Slowing down physically helps you to move with clarity and control. In a similar way, advancing slowly provides time to gather all the important details and to master skills so that you can take these with you to the next level. Moving up or on to the next thing before your body or mind is ready puts you at a disadvantage. Sometimes progress in dance feels slow enough and you may be frustrated that your teacher is “holding you back.” Try to think of going slow as a gift instead. Your teacher is giving you the tools and the time you need to move forward with more confidence in your abilities and ready to tackle the next problem.

Are there other things your teacher does or doesn’t do that are frustrating to you?

Is there something you do in class that you just don’t understand?

What are some other reasons a teacher might ask you to go slowly?

Class Planning Part One: Developing a Curriculum Outline

When I visit forums or other areas online where dance teachers congregate, I find many questions regarding how to plan lessons and design curriculum. There are certainly a variety of methods for doing both and many teachers work from a codified syllabus. For those of you who may be searching for new ideas or needing some pointers in outlining your own lessons or program of study, I am sharing my methods for doing so.

Lesson Plans will be discussed in Part Two of this series.

Designing Curriculum

Approach for Young Children

There are many approaches to teaching young children, in all methods the objectives are generally the same: To introduce and practice age-appropriate movement skills, to prepare students for working and functioning within a classroom environment, and to instill a love of dance. Though it can vary, young children generally reach similar levels of motor skill, muscular, and cognitive development at or around the same time. If you are planning a curriculum for these younger age groups it is essential that you have some familiarity with childhood development. Pushing students to perform skills that are beyond their muscular control can damage their bodies.

Mastery Approach

After age six or seven, age-appropriateness on many levels is no longer as crucial (exceptions would be pointe work or other extreme physical activities prior to growth maturity, appropriateness of choreography and music subject matter). Instead, development is better measured through prerequisite skill mastery. Though advancement may occur at different speeds, a new student at 15 begins and progresses in much the same way a seven-year-old who is new to dance does. Designing a curriculum, then, becomes more about appropriate sequence of learning.

Moving Backward

When designing short-term curriculum, I generally work backward. In other words, I begin with the goal, the endpoint, the ideal, and then decide how to get there. If I am designing curriculum for a workshop the aims may be fewer and less grand than if I’m planning curriculum for a full year of study.

Let’s say one of my final goals is to present a dance, I try to decide which skills I’d like to include or which performance qualities I’d like to see, and give special attention to these in the classes leading up to the performance. In fact, for ease in preparation, I often create entire phrases or combinations of movement for class with the intent that these (or something very similar) will go directly into a final performance work. I do the same in lesson planning, making sure to include exercises featuring movements found in the final combination.

This backward method of planning is not that original. After all it is difficult to figure out how to get somewhere until you know where you are going. The whole idea may even seem obvious but it is a process that I’ve neglected myself at times (regretfully). If you’ve ever found yourself trying to pound a skill into your students and wondering why they are not improving, this is a good time to reassess your goals and determine if perhaps they’ve missed some key building blocks along the way!

To build curriculum for a class or course of study, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What do I want the students to be able to do by the end of the year(s)/month/semester/session?
2. What skills are necessary to reach each of the above goals? (List them all, even obvious ones)
3. What skills must the students have familiarity with (if not mastery of) to accomplish these goals?

The above image contains samples of various goals. Your opinions and experiences may often dictate what is considered necessary, though some skills have inherent prerequisites.

Moving Forward

When I’m working on curriculum that spans multiple years of training, I often work in a more progressive manner, though the end goals are always in the back of my mind:

1. I list skills in the order I think they should be learned (including variations like facing barre, then one-hand on barre, then from 5th position, then in center, etc.)
2. Then, I place these skills in two columns, according to level: Essential and Overlap. Essential Skills are those requiring mastery in order to move on to the next level. Overlap Skills are those of which students are developing a working knowledge. Overlap usually appear in the Essential column of subsequent levels.

Abstract Skills

Some skills are more abstract than others (for instance musicality, performance quality, etc.) but I like to consider these when focusing on curriculum planning – setting a few goals in these areas which I will strive to incorporate into daily/weekly classes. I do this simply because I don’t want to forget them. They may seem obvious to me but not to a less experienced dancer. “They” say that certain things can’t be taught – but I believe even these less tangible skills can be improved through thoughtful practice and encouragement.

*These tables are not intended to be used as curriculum. They are just rough examples of how a chart might look. Your curriculum would be more thoroughly planned and would probably make more sense!

Have you ever designed your own curriculum? How did you go about it? Can you think of other methods or tips to share with readers?