A new approach in my teaching

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 journey.  As a young student I didn’t always enjoy all the areas of everything that I needed to learn, and I certainly didn’t appreciate it until I had to teach it for myself.  This has made me think about changing direction in some areas of my classes.  I want to stretch the students further on their learning journey in tap and make sure they have a well rounded knowledge as well as making myself more aware of how significant the intricate details are to the learning process.

I wanted to share what I did in these recent classes in case anyone found it useful.

My Techniques for teaching rhythm and improvisation in Tap dance

I wanted to work on rhythm and improvisation as I thought about how as a student, rhythm was a word that I didn't like to hear in class. I knew it had to be done as an important instrument to learning good tap.   I could hear the rhythms and clap them back but to then take it to the next level and improvise steps to that same exact rhythm was so difficult and the more I tried the harder it became.  This was my inspiration to try and help students to overcome this same fear that I had.  For some people, they can hear the rhythm very easily and respond with fluent beats immediately but not everyone is the same.

Firstly, I tried to encourage different ways to hear the rhythm, whether its singing it or creating a word rhyme to it or just counting it out loud. I like to practice hearing rhythms is by listening to music, any music and pulling out the rhythms that I can hear. if you can find that rhythm with your feet, then great, it doesn't have to be totally accurate at the start, just feel it.

The next step is building up the composition of steps, I encouraged them to go back to the basics and use simple movements. Eventually, these can be enhanced by adding a direction, a turn, an arm or a level.  Other elements that I wanted them to think about was, what does the listener hear, is there light and shade within your composition. Are you performing the movements accurately to the correct rhythm, sometimes not having the correct technical knowledge of a step, can sometimes catch the students out and then they must also think about the performance quality of the improvisation/rhythm response, is it interesting and would the observer be drawn to how the accents have been highlighted.

To build up and gain further confidence they worked in small groups, I broke the rhythm into sections so that each dancer had a section of counts to perform.  The rhythm can be as simple as you like, however, you want to encourage them to hear the flow of the rhythm. They worked together drawing on each other’s ideas, developing the rhythm with dance steps to create a performance.  Eventually, with plenty of practice, the students will gain both the ability and confidence to become more spontaneous in the reactions to the rhythms.

The following week, I tried a slightly different approach to build on their ability to feel the rhythm. I created a short rhythmical sequence combining stamps and claps.  We started in a large group circle and rotated the rhythm, each dancer did a count, then I broke it down to smaller groups until it was just in couples.  I encouraged them to try out new ways of presenting the rhythm, back to back, facing each other, eyes open or closed, I wanted them to feel the fluidity of the rhythm rather than think about the counts of it.  It was interesting to observe how the students responded to the different presentations and how each group found their most natural method.

They learnt from each other’s ideas during both of the exercises and in turn, this will help them to build up vocabulary and improve their sensitivity to hear and respond more quickly and naturally to the rhythms, building confidence to respond and present on their own.