Having Anne Green Gilbert come and teach a few classes, I really learned so much more about how to create a lesson plan and add variety to a dance lesson plan. The brain dance is a great way to get the brain and body moving. Having a focus/ concept for the dance class was helpful in creating the movements of phrases and picking out movement activities for the classes to experience with as well. Because I am teaching dance classes this summer and in my near future, these skills I learned about teaching and creating a lesson plan will be useful in my future.
Dance390: Dance Teaching Methodologies
Teaching our lesson plans in central Washington, I discovered my true love for teaching and working with kids. Megan and I taught a hip-hop routine at Moxee Middle School to three different groups of P.E. classes of seventh and eighth graders. Even though most of the students we taught had never taken dance classes before, all of the students ended up dancing by the end of the class we taught. It was hard at first with some of the middle schoolers who did not want to allow their body to move, but once everyone around them felt comfortable all of the students ended up dancing. This experience as a whole impacted the communities of the school districts we taught dance classes at by allowing the students to move to music in ways their body may not be use to. Also, sometimes when I expeirenced struggles from the students after breaking down a step, I had to go back and re-teach the step in a different way or use different words to describe the movement.
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In Central Washington, Megan and I taught classes at Moxee Middle School just a few miles outside of Yakima. Our lesson plan incorporated the concept of weight, and all three of our classes were around sixty people each in size. After the first class, we were given advice from Stephanie to adapt our class for the next two classes in breaking down the movements to students that had little background in dance.
In the first class Megan and I taught, we found out that having a large class size was hard to maintain due to the amount of little conversations within the group that were distractions to us. After the teachers helped us quit down the class during and in between activities, we implemented Anne Green Gilbert’s clapping idea to quit down the class effectively. To our surprise, it worked better then we expected. We were also able to have every kid participate in our weight sharing activity called magic hands. It was interesting watching the students, both girls and boys, exploring weight sharing lightly, then with force. We applied walks and pivot turns that we did across the floor into our dance to link our class together. After the first class, Megan and I discussed the concept of weight when we taught across the floor and the combination at the end of class. The students all participated and enjoyed our combination that we taught and it was great to see them all participate and smile while they danced.
Megan and I encountered some problems during our classes. First off, I started the class with a quick warm-up before the brain steps that incorporated the grape vine and slides while standing in a large circle. Directions were hard for the students to figure out, so we only did this warm-up for about two minutes each class just to try and get the students moving. The brain dance was successful all three times, but it was also hard to get every kid to participate and many of them did not understand why we did this warm-up. After we had the students walk around and explore the space in the gym while we named off different ways of walking or natural disasters to encounter, the students loosened up a bit. Across the floor was always hard to organize because first the students need to be able to understand rhythm to go in groups across the floor in turns, and count eight counts before the next person starts. In both the across the floor and combination Megan and I learned how to break down the dance steps and mention that we slowed down the tempo to demonstrate movements.
After teaching at the Middle School, Megan and I joined Anh and Sarah Rose to teach East Valley high school students at a local dance studio. In this class we focused on the concept of relationships because we taught on Valentine’s Day.
To start off the class, we first warmed up the class with a brain dance and warm-up combination. We took turns naming off what we were going to do next and we all four worked well together. After we did an activity of making a shape, and then another person would come up and look at three different body parts, and the original shape had to move three times for each body part. This activity allowed the students to explore both relationships with other dancers, and also relationships with space and their own body’s movement. We then did across the floor and reviewed the combinations from the first three days of class. The students helped us with the choreography so we did everything correctly. Then we taught the dancers our three counts of eight after reviewing the rest of the dance and they picked it up so quickly I was impressed. The improv dancing and reflection at the end of class was the best part because watching and listening to each dancer express themselves and talk about everything they learned through out the week was really touching.
Next time in the first class with middle school students, I would apply more tasks for the students to control the large class more successfully. For example, I would tell the students to walk to one side of the gym as light and quietly as possible. Another thing I would do next time is break down dance steps such as a pivot turn by using different terms to express the movement and show it multiple times for more success of the students in learning dance steps. In the second class, I would make sure that we plan out a lesson plan that does not overlap with previous days so that every activity they do is new. Then I would allow the students to experiment more with improv dancing, and make the across the floor movements clearer with multiple explanations to make sure every students understands the movements.
Overall I learned many factors about teaching both in the middle school and after school program that I can apply to in my future of teaching. In teaching students with little background in dance and movement you have to explain tempo of music and break down the movements with multiple explanations. Also give them tasks to do in between activities to keep the students engaged is helpful as well. With the after school program I learned that teaching with four people instead of just two is not always easy to adapt with at first but once we figured out how to take turns our dance class was more successful. And lastly, lesson plans are essential in teaching a dance class to make sure you have enough activities for the dancers to do, but also you have to be able to adapt the lesson plan depending on the group and setting of the class.
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