A Prescription for Students Who’ve Skipped the Basics

The Diagnosis

Without a good overall (curriculum) plan, teachers may find themselves skipping around or getting ahead of their students’ skill level. The tell-tale symptom that this has occurred: You find yourself drilling the same movement over and over and over without much improvement.

The Treatment Plan

If you are working with a group and finding that the students have missed some important information along the way, it is not too late to get back to basics and back on track. You can do so without making the students feel like they’ve been demoted to Dance 101. The approach to practicing the skill they are trying to master may just have to be a bit more creative than repeat, repeat, repeat, a process that only leads to frustration or injury.

The Dosage

Let’s say you are working on pirouettes. There isn’t any other way to practice a pirouette than to just do it… or is there? Well, in essence that is true but the prescription for faulty pirouettes is not to do fifty more of them. Instead, the teacher must get a bit sneaky: crush up the medicine and sneak it in with the rest of the students’ food. Here’s the process:

1. What’s in a pirouette? Break the movement down into components

Some will be obvious: A properly turned out retiré passé. Others may be more underlying: The use of the core to avoid spiraling in the pirouette. Make a physical, or at least mental, list of these components.

2. Examine where in a class these elements can be practiced

Add a balance in retiré to the end of one or more exercises in both barre and center; Have students do “log rolls” across the floor to create awareness of rotating without a spiral in the body. Find places to sprinkle your list of pirouette essentials throughout the entire class… throughout the week… throughout the term.

3. When it comes time to practice pirouettes, look for quality not quantity. Address how the movement feels and look for imagery to apply whenever possible – be creative.

Rise from a plié into a space that, like a jello mold, is shaped exactly like the your body is or should be in the turn; Imagine a string connecting the lifted knee to the opposite shoulder, as the knee leads the turn around, the opposite shoulder comes along.

Preventative Medicine

As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Sometimes in class the best practice is in fact just performing the skill. However, without a good working knowledge of a skill’s properties a dancer is doomed to repeating the same mistakes. Consider it preventative medicine to begin with a plan for how you’ll build toward more advanced steps and movements with students. Look for ways to work or improve the basics before asking students to “leap.” If you aren’t sure where to start I’ve outlined some of my ideas on developing curriculum and lesson planning in other posts.

Have you found creative ways of getting back to basics?

Share your prescriptions in the comments!

Month by Month: January — Setting Goals

January classes are probably well under way. However, there is no time like the present for you and your students to set goals for the coming months. January is a great time to take a little time out to guide students in setting goals and planning how they’ll achieve them.

If you are midway through your season, now may be a good time to meet individually with older students about their progress and goals for the year.

Short or long-term goals could be set for an entire class as well. Have the students work together on planning some group objectives.

Even very young students could learn an important lesson on planning and reaching goals.

Talk about January being a month when many people think ahead and decide how they’ll get from one place to another.

• Practice with each exercise, selecting a goal such as remembering to point their toes on each sauté.
• Practice setting goals and sticking to them. For instance, the goal may be staying quiet as students wait their turn to go across the floor. Ask for suggestions on what they will do instead (watch closely) and then have them choose a method to make sure they are watching (each dancer strikes a pose when they finish their progression and it is the job of everyone else to copy their body shape).
• Literally practice pathways that start at A and end at B, then allow each individual dancer to choose the movements, rhythms, or methods to get there. Discuss how there are many ways to reach the same goal and have them explore which choices worked best, or fastest, or were the most fun.

I know time in the studio is always precious but with older students, take time out of class to discuss how to set realistic goals for technique, flexibility, or performance. The time spent will be worth it if each student stays focused with clear steps on how they’ll hit their target. Students could try coming up with both a short-term goal (one month) and a long-term one (6 months or a year).

Below is a one-page form that can help students plan their strategy.

The top half of the page asks the student to set a goal. For example, the dancer may want to be able to do a triple pirouette.

Then, it has the student list specific steps they’ll take to reach this goal. For instance, the dancer may do Theraband exercises at home to strengthen weak or wobbly ankles, spend the moments before class on warming up with core exercises instead of chatting or stretching, test and challenge her balance throughout class (at the end of each exercise, by taking the hand off the barre occasionally, etc.). Help your students break down their goal into these manageable pieces.

Then the form helps them prepare for the inevitable moment when they lose their focus or motivation. This backup plan could be asking a classmate to join her in the warm-up, or watching an inspiring video of professionals turning, or picking one favorite television program during which she’ll sit and do the exercises.

The bottom half of the form is to be completed when the desired window of time has closed. Six months later, has your student been able to consistently do a triple pirouette? You could collect all of your student’s worksheets in a notebook until it is time to revisit them. When you do, the form offers some questions of reflection that work even if the goal was not attained.

Remember, your students will probably need some help with this exercise. Encourage thoughtful planning and creativity, offer examples, and suggestions if they need them. Good Luck!

What are some other ways you could put goal-setting into practice in your classroom?

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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?