I am pleased to be able to offer two new courses for the September group of courses starting on 25th. I want to expand a little on what you can expect to explore and address on these two new courses.

Learning and Teaching Dance: teaching social and leisure dance

Further to what I said in my earlier post about this course, I want to encourage everyone teaching social and leisure dance to join me on this course. With guided development tips about teaching this wonderful population of dancers, you can help your dancers to get the most from their dance hobby.

There are many settings and situations for teaching social and leisure dance and this is why it is so important for you to be able to tailor your development to enhance your own dance teaching practice. If you are teaching young people, older dancers or a group of mixed level dancers then your main focus on the course will be on the teaching aspects and needs for your particular group.

Learning social and leisure dance should be fun and this is remembered throughout the course.

Whatever social dance genre you teach you should find plenty of opportunities on this course to help to stimulate and inspire your dance teaching practice.

To the Line dance teachers who have been in touch recently, I hope we can work together on this course next month.

Dance Teaching Ethics – an introduction

I wondered about the title for this course because saying the ‘e’ (ethics) word might put teachers off. But the reality is that the ethics of what we do and how we behave as dance teachers is what it is all about. This is not a heavy duty academic course but a short introduction to what I like to refer to as ‘doing the right thing in dance’.

Ethics and dance teaching might seem like a totally new topic for dance teachers but in reality dance teachers have been dealing with ethical dilemmas for a long time. In ethical dance teaching practice we aim to deal with such dilemmas in ways that respect the whole person. We do this through teaching methods and approaches that value dance students and dancers for what they are rather than what they can do. In other words, valuing the person they are and not just their dance abilities. This ethical or person-centred dance teaching practice considers both the physical and psychological aspects of the teaching. Ethical teaching helps student dancers and dancers to reach their fullest potential.

During this course we will explore, discuss and reflect on examples of teaching ethically and how ethical principles can be applied in dance teaching practice. We will also consider the codes, rules or standards that dance teachers often sign up to and how they work or not in practice.

I fully believe that embodying ethics in our dance teaching practices helps us to be better dance teachers.

As with all of my online courses, the emphasis is about applying the development in practice and seeing and feeling results. There is no formal essay writing. Any writing is in note form so that you can write your thoughts about your teaching practice without worrying about writing in academic format.

Will you join me on this course to explore another aspect of dance teaching practice?

The third course available to take in September, is one that has already been enjoyed by dance teachers from around the world:

Learning and Teaching Dance: tension and rigidity in dance

This course has already been run very successfully, twice this year. Reflecting on how tension and rigidity are often taught or encouraged as a way of achieving control in dance, certainly makes for interesting study. Feedback from earlier courses found that applying the techniques and ideas about releasing unnecessary tension has helped the dance teachers to help their students improve technique and performance.

Through releasing unnecessary tension we explore how this impacts on your student dancers and the potential benefits that this offers.

Using breathing and relaxation skills is something I have believed in for many, many years and it is really enjoyable to share them with interested teachers and explore how these  skills are incorporated within their own practices. Helping your dancers to reduce tension and rigidity often has a positive effect on you, as the teacher, too.

If you want to develop your understanding of tension and rigidity in dance then please join me on this course.

Booking courses

You will find booking forms and other information about the courses in this earlier post.

There is such a lot of development that happens in the short three weeks of these courses. I am delighted with how engaged teachers are during the courses and their commitment to applying course materials and development to their dance teaching practices. I am really looking forward to these three courses starting in September.