2011-02-08

Teaching Experienced Dancers

It can be difficult for regular dance groups to differentiate their instruction, especially if the class covers a wide range of skill and experience levels. Hopefully, your class will be large enough that you can split it between levels, but then you run into the issue of how to define the split. When, as I discussed recently, does a newbie start to be considered not?

In the group I do Scottish Country Dancing with, the split is between "beginners" and "intermediate/advanced". The dance night typically runs with an hour of lessons, followed by an hour or so of mixed social dance, where everyone is encouraged to dance with everyone else.

You graduate yourself when you feel confident --no one will specifically tell you "okay, you're I&A now". This tends to work well for the class, but still leads to an occasionally problematic gap in skill from one end of the I&A group to the other. The general solution is for teachers of the I&A class to focus on seriously breaking down techniques and practising particular figures until they are perfect --the more experienced dancers can generally use a friendly reminder on timing, and the less experienced dancers get to really know what the figure is supposed to look like.

Unfortunately, some teachers are more skilled at this than others, which leads occasionally to problems as they assume a higher overall skill level than is actually present in the class. So long as the teacher is open and paying attention, this isn't too bad, but when a teacher becomes caustic towards students who are less practised at certain figures or incidentals, or can't understand a question asked because they assume everyone in the class should already know that thing "because it is an experienced dance class" you have a problematic situation.

Even experienced dancers can be missing certain things. Moreover, SCD has been danced in its current form for nearly a hundred years. Yes, the "proper" way to, say, perform a rights hands round is with the hands joined only with the person on your diagonal, as opposed to all as one group of four hands, but sometimes it's easier to join all hands together, or awkward to split the hands into their diagonals due to the previous figure. So, even a dancer who is experienced in technique may not always know the exact technique for this particular dance.

About the best thing you can do to teach such groups, is to know the dance well, and watch closely as they practise. That will help you accurately answer questions on technique or movement, politely, when students ask. Sniping at students because they "should" know this achieves nothing useful1.

And remember too, sometimes students ask questions because, while they may be experienced at a certain figure, they may be dancing cross-gender for whatever reason (it's especially common in SCD for females to dance the male role, due to the natural gender imbalance of the class), and not familiar with the particular differences they need to know from dancing the opposite of their more familiar role.

1: Especially not in a social dance context, where the focus is generally more on having fun and being friendly to people. Perfection is all well and good, but if you're not preparing for a performance, perhaps it's not as necessary.

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