The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Welcome to the Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast. I'm your host, Maia. No matter who, what, or when you teach, I'm here to share all my best tips and tools, along with real and practical conversations with fellow dance educators to help you be the very best dance teacher you can be.

Let's talk about it.

Hello, hello, and thanks so much for joining me for today's episode. I'm really excited to get into it because this episode builds in a really nice way on my favorite episode from season one.

I'm just going to say that, and I don't say that to be disrespectful to any of my guests because I was so excited about every single one of my season one guests. I have so many sort of favorite episodes among the conversations that I was able to have with guests, but if you've been listening from the start, you know, and you're probably sick of me saying this. I constantly reference my curriculum planning episode, which is season one, episode one.

And with that being the very first episode and really the foundation of everything that I do as a dance teacher, how I plan my curriculum, how I plan, what skills and what technical elements we're going to work on throughout the season. That's what fuels me through the entire season. Every single year is building this fresh curriculum and tailoring it to each new student group that I have.

So if you haven't already listened, you really kind of have to listen to that episode to understand the basis for where I'm coming from with today's episode, but I'm so excited to now build on that and get into how once you have your curriculum planned and you know what skills you're going to be touching upon throughout the season, how do you then build a really nice arc through your season that will prepare your students to peak for their performances if they have performances or peak physically when you need them to or at the end of the season so that they feel that they really have grown as athletes as well as dancers. So we're talking about not so much the nitty gritty of lesson planning and curriculum planning, but the general arc of the season and making sure that it makes sense in a really cohesive way for the dancers physically. Now, another caveat that I'll add to that, and this isn't necessarily an episode that you have to listen to in order to understand today's episode, but season one, episode two jumps training with coach Kristin Stam, who is my sister, and you would think that being my sister, I would have already known this before I had her on the show for a formal interview, but I didn't.

I learned something brand new in that episode from her, which is that as a coach of track and field athletes, specifically, she works with long jumpers, high jumpers, hurdlers, so they're doing jumps, but they're doing it obviously in a very different setting than a dancer would do it where they just do one jump and they're trying to do that one jump either as long or as high or as fast as they possibly can. And she mentioned in our interview that at the beginning of their season, when they first start training, they're basically not doing any technical work. The beginning of their season for the track athletes is a very much about just conditioning the body and gaining strength and stamina overall.

And they don't even start working the technical elements of the jump until after that initial conditioning phase. So that was a big part of what informed my wanting to do a follow-up episode. I recognize that you still need to do curriculum planning where you're planning out the specific dance steps and skills that you're going to be working on throughout the season.

But once you have that, you need to then take this extra step that I didn't mention in that curriculum planning episode of taking a look and saying physically, how am I going to prepare my dancers that by the end of the season, when they have their performance, they're physically in their peak condition to perform those skills to the best of their ability at that time. With my curriculum planning, I did mention that I typically have about four units to a season and within each unit, I'm focusing on a different big picture item and then categorizing the different steps and skills to fit under those four big picture things that we're tackling for the entire year. So in order to build a really successful arc to the whole season, what I would recommend that you do is take a look at the third column within each of your four units.

And if you have listened to the curriculum planning episode, you know exactly what I'm talking about. But for those of you that don't, I use columns to organize skills that the students are more familiar and comfortable with, but that we're going to be utilizing and revisiting within each unit. And then the steps and skills that they have been exposed to but need more work on.

And the third column is referencing brand new steps and skills. So from a technical standpoint, the third column is typically going to be where you need to spend the most time and do the most work technically. But I think it's so important to remember that the dancer's technique can only go as far as their physical ability on a very practical level.

So even if they have the cognitive understanding of how the technique is meant to be applied, if they can't physically apply it correctly, they're not going to get to that point where they're doing that new step or skill to an advanced or even a proficient level, depending on the level of your dancer in general. So taking a look at that third column, those brand new steps and skills that you plan to incorporate any time within the year, whether that's first unit or fourth unit, take a look at all of them as a whole and then pinpoint and maybe do a little brainstorm and jot these down. What are the biggest physical barriers facing your dancers with mastering these skills? So, for example, you might have already pinpointed flexibility as one of your big picture concepts that you want to work on with the dancers and made that one of your unit goals.

Now you want to look at where in the season does it make the most sense to work on flexibility and how are we making sure that we're incorporating flexibility training into everything that we do? Because we cannot wait until the fourth unit, you know, let's say the fourth or fifth month that we're working with these dancers to say, OK, now we're going to do a minute of holding the splits at the beginning of class. And I say that because I had teachers when I was a young dancer that would say that, you know, we do a little warm up and maybe like, OK, go down into your right leg split and hold it for a minute. And I'm really happy to say that I think that that is a pretty outdated method.

And a lot of teachers are getting more intentional about how they're training now, but especially for casual or recreational dance teachers that don't necessarily have an extensive amount of training outside of other casual or recreational studios. And I'm not ragging on anybody here because that was my upbringing, too, up until I went to college. Really, I wasn't exposed to much else.

You know, if you've grown up with that being what flexibility training is, you're just naturally going to think that that's an element of the class. So I'm kind of getting on my high horse here, but this is why I think it's really important for us to share how we each do our own systems of coming up with ideas, coming up with the goals for our classes, coming up with the arc for our seasons and to be really intentional about taking time for yourself personally as well. Once you hear other people's ideas and once you share your own ideas with other people, get your ideas down on paper for yourself and say, what am I going to do that is going to physically build flexibility from day one? So maybe your first unit isn't around flexibility, but you know that you have skills that are going to require increased flexibility down the road.

Well, then when you are looking at unit one, which let's say maybe that is going to be core strength, make sure that you're not doing a bunch of exercises that are going to tighten the hip flexors, for example. And then when you move on from that unit, you're like, oh, shoot, now it's flexibility unit. And everything that I did in unit one has worked against this.

So you're taking a little bit more of a holistic look to make sure that any kind of training or conditioning that you're doing throughout the season is serving each of the goals that you have set for that year's curriculum. To give you another example of something that I really did not give enough time or effort, I think, when I was starting out as a teacher is stamina. When I first started out as a young teacher and I had my first few groups of students, I was really interested in delving into technique and helping the students with technique.

But I think I did kind of miss the point of what I said earlier, that the dancers technique can only go as far as their practical physical ability. So what I would do is have a little bit of a slower pace to my classes where we were really delving into technical elements. And there is a lot of value to that.

I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. But then we would get into the second half of the season where we were working on recital dances, and I would have these very physical dances with a lot of energy. And the dancers might have proper technique on the skills that we had worked on in the first half of the year, but they would have a hard time getting through the whole entire dance with full energy from start to finish.

So now, even though I have not changed the way that I set up curriculum to specifically work on specific steps and skills and the technique that's behind them, and I will still have slower classes or slower periods of the class where we do take the time to break down that technique. I also make sure within each and every unit that I do that I have some longer combinations or phrases that I do that are very high energy. And or I will also do a lot of reps of something that we're working on or have them do a combination many times in a row or many different variations of the combination that requires a lot of stamina.

Or we'll have a conditioning based warm up that requires a lot of explosive energy and goes on for maybe a quarter to a third of the class to really work their stamina. Then we'll do a technical element where it takes it down a little bit in the energy and then we'll end with a higher energy across the floor, keeping the energy up, get that stamina going again. And I'll try to maintain that so that when we get to the point where they have to do a minute dance with really high energy and going full out, they're not getting fatigued and losing out on all of that technique that we learned because they just simply don't have the stamina to do it.

I'm thinking of a switch leap, for example, which I know will not appear in every style of dance. But when I was talking about the flexibility earlier, that came to mind because even if you have excellent takeoff and excellent control, if you don't have the flexibility, your switch leap really is not going to work that well, right? So for something like that, if a switch leap is one of those, quote unquote, third column skills in one of your units that you know you want your dancers to tackle this season, you would want to work flexibility into some of the earlier work you're doing in the season because you don't want to get to a unit where you're working on switch leaps and then realize they don't have the flexibility to actually execute one well. So let's say early in the season you build that flexibility and it's a very functional flexibility, of course, right? We're not splatting down in the splits and just holding for a little bit.

We're building functional flexibility. We have the range to be able to get into the position we need to in the air for a switch leap, but if they don't also have explosive muscle control to be able to get high enough into the air to execute the switch leap, it's also not going to be a successful skill for them. So along with the functional flexibility work that we're doing, we'll want to also incorporate explosive muscle movement early enough in the arc of our season that they're able to build that more and more and more leading up to the end of their season when they can put everything together.

And then let's say it's in their recital or in their end of the year showcase or whatever it is, then the switch leap comes together. But if we wait and we're just looking and we say, oh, OK, it's time to work on switch leaps. Oh, OK.

In order to do switch leaps, you know, we're going to have to increase our flexibility and we're going to have to be able to really push off the ground explosively and get high in the air. And it's already, you know, two months out from recital. You're going to probably be a lot more successful if you're starting out with building those skills five, six, seven months out and then just maintaining and continuing to build on them as you're incorporating that skill into combinations, choreography, whatever the case may be.

That also gives you the opportunity that when you get into recital time, if you are someone that works on building a two, three, four minute dance for a final showcase or a recital, typically that is going to take the majority of your time as you get into the later part of the season. And the last thing you want to do is be trying to cram in learning steps in choreography, getting the technique down for those steps in choreography, conditioning the body to be able to execute that technique, and then also layering on artistry. That's too much.

You're going to run out of time. Right. So build this arc of the season way at the beginning of the season before choreography and recital is even like a glimmer in your eye, hopefully.

Some of us have to start super early with that. Right. But let's just say hypothetically, the very, very start of your season, you're conditioning the body to be able to execute.

Then after conditioning, you're layering on the technique to apply those conditioning skills correctly. Then you start to learn the steps and you're applying the conditioning and the technique specifically to the steps. And then you start to put the steps together into this beautiful story.

And you're layering on the artistry and the personality of the dancers and the beauty and the energy and all of those things. That's why we build an arc to our season to make sure that we're not trying to cram all of those things into the choreography process, because I think if you do that, you're not going to be as successful. OK, I got a little tangency there a couple of times.

I appreciate you guys that stuck with me for that. And I really hope that this was helpful. I know that not everyone has the same season layout.

You know, we all have our own different systems and processes in the way that our studios operate or the way that we teach operates because we're not even all teaching at studios. So I am kind of speaking to my own personal experience here. I know there are a lot that are going to relate to that.

And I would love to hear from those of you that do relate. If you find that a similar system works for you or if you have other examples of this that you've applied yourself that have been successful and also those of you that are listening and maybe saying not so much, Maia, that's not really my experience. I would love to hear that, too, because, again, this isn't something that I really thought that much about until pretty recently.

And in the past, I did have a system and a process that I followed, but I was so focused on I need to teach this step and this is how you execute it technically. But the physicality and the athletic element of it is something that I'm more recently super interested in and delving into. And I'm not the expert on this.

So as with so many of the topics that I cover on the podcast, I'm just kind of trying to open the door to have that conversation with all of you and hear what works for you and maybe spark something that will be successful for all of us. So please, if you're able, hop in the Casual Dance Teachers Network on Facebook and share some feedback and your thoughts on this with me. You can also join me on Instagram at the Casual Dance Teachers Podcast.

And please don't forget to show some love to the podcast on whatever platform you're listening on. A review and a rating really goes a long way in helping to get the word out about this and show some love to GB Mystical as well, who wrote the theme music for the show. To close, I have a very on theme quote for you from Pat Riley, who's a former NBA coach.

Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.