Bringing ideas together

As my professional practice, is based around teaching and running my dance school, I choose this as the focus of my research project. When I set up my own dance school, I did it because I wanted to build a legacy and something that reflected my beliefs and values.

I had taught in a variety of settings including salsa clubs, community groups, schools, fitness, private dance schools, primary and secondary schools and FE colleges. 10 years on, starting this MA course, I found myself questioning how my school was set up, the ethos I wanted to embrace and also how I filtered this into my teaching. On reflection, I noticed that prior experience had a lot to do with my beliefs and my priorities as the owner of a school as well as personality traits. For example, as a child I struggled socially in school to be part of a group as I felt my “difference” was not understood. As a result, when I set up my school I made a point of creating an environment in which “difference” was accepted and embraced. 

In terms of the learning environment, I adopt a holistic approach in terms of looking at the whole child as an individual. Rather then just teaching them how to dance, I am actually more concerned with who they are and what they want to achieve. Recognising individually, and also helping students reach their full potential is one of my greatest strengths as a teacher.  I look at the different qualities of each student, their skills, abilities and realistic areas for improvement, then I work out how to challenge this. I also award progression, as well as exam outcomes, as I acknowledge hard work and dedication is a process, not just the end result . I also encourage healthy competition so students focus on being the best they can be, and not trying to compare themselves in a negative light with their peers. Similarly, this mentality makes the individual student focus on their own strengths and rather then create a situation where one is better then the other. For example, turning it into positive statements, saying X has strengths in this area, where as Y has strengths in this area. Children are perceptive and can rank themselves in ability, without the teacher’s help, but as a teacher you can help turn this into something positive by helping children understand where their strengths lie and that it is ok not to be good at everything. 

More recently, children’s work ethics are beginning to change and my challenge is to try to reverse the mentality that being average at everything is acceptable. It seems that the with public education so focused on meeting targets that children are now developing the mindset that X is your target so X is what you will achieve, no more, no less. Where is the individuality? As dance teachers does it make it more difficult to produce hardworking, dedicated, skilled dancers?

This led me to the ideas of values, beliefs and life skills. If education is making us behave in an average mediocre way, then how can we as dance teachers produce ambitious and inspired individuals? Dance has a way of instilling various other skills and values such as team work, confidence, self esteem, and much has been written about this in terms of cross curricular approaches and kinaesthetic learning. I would now like to focus on how the teaching of life skills and values are embedded in my own school and filtered into my teaching as my research project. in