Teaching a class

You have ninety minutes, a hall, and a group of adults who have paid to be there. Here is how to spend it.

The shape of the evening

A workable ninety minutes looks like this:

Start with dancing, not with talking. The first ten minutes are a warm-up and a confidence check: if the class can still circle and promenade from last week, you know where you stand. If they cannot, you have found out cheaply, before you build on it.

Do not teach new material in the last twenty minutes. Anything learned when people are tired is learned badly, and it will be wrong next week.

Teach, then dance

Every new call goes through the same three stages:

1. Say what it is and where it starts. Name the formation the dancers are in. If they cannot picture the start, nothing after it will land.
2. Walk it through slowly, without music. Hands joined where the call needs hands joined. Say the words that matter — which hand, which direction, who moves.
3. Dance it to music. As soon as the shape is right, put the record on. Slow music is better than no music.

The gap between stage 2 and stage 3 is where classes are won and lost. Dancers can walk a call perfectly and still not know it; they only know it when they have done it in time. Walk it twice, then dance it. If it breaks, walk it once more, then dance it again.

Do not explain a call three ways. Say it once, show it once, then let them walk it. Too much talking is the most common fault of a new teacher.

Two new calls an evening

Two is a comfortable pace. Three is possible if the class is quick and the calls are small. One is right after a difficult evening, or the week before a dance.

The course pages group four or five units into a class. That is a term's worth of material, not one evening's — take the units in order, two a week, and let the class page's teaching sequence be your running order rather than a single night's agenda.

Drills, not repetition

Isolated repetition — the same call twenty times in a row — teaches the call and nothing else. It is also dull, and dull classes lose dancers.

A drill puts two or three calls together into a short piece of real dancing, and then stops. The class dances it, you watch, you fix one thing, they dance it again. The class pages in this book give drills for every class, and Drills collects a graded set.

Use a drill to make the calls arrive in real time, with real handholds, from shapes the dancers have to recognise for themselves. That is closer to the dancing they came for.

Keep the inactive dancers working

The manual expects the dancers not named in a call to counter-dance: to hold the shape, keep their place, and be ready for the next call.

That is not the same as doing nothing, and it has to be taught. When you call Split Two, the unnamed pair are working — they open a gap and close it again. When you call Heads Separate, the Sides are working: they hold the square steady and stay in sequence. The rules behind this are in the rules pages.

Say it out loud the first few times: "Sides, you are holding the shape — stand still and watch where the Heads are going." A class that has learned to counter-dance will survive calls they have never heard, because they know where to stand while other people dance.

When one dancer is struggling

It will happen every week. Handle it like this:

• Fix it for the square, not for the dancer. Call a short figure that uses the call they are missing, so they get another go without being singled out.
• Give them one thing to do. Not three corrections. "Turn left, not right" is a lesson; a list is noise.
• Stand beside them once. If you can, dance the call in their position briefly, or call it with hands joined. Most struggles are a handhold or a direction, not a misunderstanding.
• Never stop the whole class for one pair. Let the figure keep moving, and take the dancer aside for two minutes at the break.

If a dancer is struggling with the dancing — hearing the beat, keeping moving, holding on — that is different from struggling with a call. Mention it quietly at the break, and offer the practice pages: How to practise.

Finish with something they can do well

End the evening on a success. The last ten minutes should be a tip, or a short figure, built from calls the class already knows cold — nothing new, nothing they have to think about.

This is not vanity. Dancers who leave a hall having danced well come back next week and practise in between. Dancers who leave having failed at the last two calls do not.

Next

• the units, class by class → Course overview
• practising between classes → How to practise