Yesterday, I had my first one to one discussion with Adesola on my AOL's.  I needed to understand how to basically make sense off it all and what I needed to do to get started and make some progress.  Within in the first few minutes of our discussion, Adesola probed me to analyse how I needed to dissect my experiences of learning and then put them back together again through a new set of eyes. I have discovered that my pathways of learning have ultimately lead me into a natural progression  throughout my career, stepping stones made up of circumstances. I can now see, that when we reflect on our professional experiences, no matter how much that is, we realize that we have so many attributes and offerings within our everyday situations.  The difficulty then, is narrowing them down to which ones are the most influential to you. I am certainly clearer on my next steps of module one. I need to have belief in myself and work on now putting the Lego pieces into a new

Over the last few days, I feel like I have really begun my journey with my MAPP.  It is a totally new experience for me and I have to say I'm at the stage of being slightly over whelmed by it all,  my mind feels like it has a lots of country lanes to go down and really explore my journey so far. At the same time, I am excited to really take my knowledge and experiences to the next level, I really want to do this and do it to the best of my ability. My previous blogs,  have been about the start of my reflective journey on what I do and experience within my practice day to day. I wanted to 'get them on paper', whether they are right or wrong. I know that |I need to continue to develop my thought process for this journey, I understand that it will change as I progress through the course. At the moment,  I just need to have belief in my reflections and remember that everybody's journey will be different!

Over the weekend, I was invited to observe some classes given by a guest teacher at the studio who specializes in teaching ballet to boys. During the teachers meet, we chatted about the attitudes between boys and girls in class and how their approaches are so different and why is this? I reflected back on my classes that I had taught during the week and how I could identify with what we had discussed and I observed with more detail than I normally would on their actions during class. The girls do tend to be more competitive with each other, let’s face it, there are a lot more of them than the boys and therefore have a bigger battle to fight. They are much harder on themselves emotionally to achieve the correct technique of the movements and learn the sequences/combinations quickly.  With the boys, however, they are definitely the more ‘chilled’ students in the class. They are still competitive but they support each other too. They also, don’t seem to get frustrated quite so qu

As this journey of the MAPP begins, I feel that I have been awakened to a new depth of my teaching.  I am a truly passionate teacher and I always try to give everything to my classes so that I feel that I have accomplished something and more importantly, that my students feel that they have achieved and learnt something new or improved in every class. I am starting to reflect more on my teaching and I have begun to develop my thoughts within my classes.  I want to keep driving myself to the next level of understanding what and how I have learnt on my journey so far as a teacher of dance and how I can continue to improve.  As an example of how I am developing my outlook on my practice, I wanted to relate it some recent classes that I taught.  I teach tap to some senior students at a studio and I have been working on improving their technique of steps but as I have delved into my areas of learning, I am realizing the depth of what I was taught and how this has been integral to my jo

Today I went to help with choreography for a middle school production.  This is a compulsory requirement for their music grade.  I have been helping out for the past five years and today, my heart soared.  Last week, I had been away as I arrived for the rehearsal this morning, all of the students applauded me and they were so excited that I was there.  I felt so amazed that these young people and not all of them enjoy being involved in the production, showed their appreciation for the time that I give to them. To watch them rehearse and perform the dance movements and choreography that I set them, is fantastic and so rewarding.  I believe that I have gained their trust in that they know that I do  not want to make them feel uncomfortable on stage but to look and be absolutely amazing.  I want them to feel so proud of their achievements.  It just goes to show, that when you think something is going to be so hard to do, in fact its the opposite! I feel thankful that I can share my knowl