Teaching Strategies
Strategies for teaching preschool dance effectively crossover from teaching other disciplines. The strategies below work particularly well for teaching preschool dance, but if you go on to teach academics or other skills in the future, you will find these same strategies to be applicable and effective.
Contextualization - Contextualization is one of the most important aspects of early childhood dance. Contextualization means bringing a context, or an imaginative framework, to a movement that motivates the child to participate and to do so with the technique or skill-level that you are seeking as a teacher. Using this strategy allows your dancers to participate without feeling forced to complete a movement and if you are creative, it allows you as the teacher to get better technical results. For example: We want to build core strength in preschool dance. Instead of telling dancers to lift arms and legs of the floor and balance on their bellies, you can easily get the desired result by asking them to swim like mermen and mermaids. To encourage students to balance on one foot, we stand like flamingos. To improve the contact with the leg while balancing in parallel passé/retirée, our flamingo foot rides the elevator up to the roof and back down to the basement.
Scaffolding - Scaffolding is the second most important teaching strategy for young dancers. Scaffolding involves building a learning ladder to your desired skill. You can add context, physical props, and more until your dancer is successful with the skill and then slowly take away the additional help (the scaffolding) so that the student can do it without the support. A great example of this is teaching dancers to do the waltz step traveling across the floor. Step 1: I tell the dancers a story about invisible spiders and how the invisible spiders love colors. Even though we can’t see the invisible spiders, we know that they will pile up on top of my colored spots. I ask the dancers to help me squish them. Step 2: I put a row of spots down on the floor with space in between. Dancers tiptoe up to a spot and squish it with one foot, repeating as they cross the floor. Step 3: With the same setup, we begin to focus on alternating feet when squishing. Step 4: Once students have mastered this, I put the spots closer together and encourage two tiptoes between each spot. Step 5: Start dancers with 4 spots in front of their line but ask them to continue the movement after they run out of spots. Step 6: Remove the spots and continue the correct down, up, up pattern without the scaffolding.
Modeling and Recasting - Modeling is simply the concept of demonstrating the correct step or technique so that dancers have a good model to follow. Modeling is important but has to be balanced with the understanding that little dancers are not astute observers. They will catch some of the technique you’re presenting but not all. You also have to be aware of the balance between supporting technique and building independence - little dancers DO need to dance by themselves. (Modeling can also be used to present mistakes that you are seeing. Turn the dancers into the teachers and ask them what doesn’t look right as you perform the step incorrectly). Recasting is the act of seamlessly presenting the correct movement when a dancer performs it incorrectly.
Total Physical Response (TPR) - Total Physical Response is a teaching strategy used frequently in language learning and sometimes in other skill sets as well. It asks the student to move in response to the words that they are hearing. TPR can be used very successfully to explore movement concepts during bubble dance time. As the teacher reads a story, dancers act out any actions that they hear. For example: “Little Red Riding Hood skipped down the path” will start students skipping. “The pathway was very curvy” will help the students add a pathway to their skips. “Little Red Riding Hood began to skip faster when she heard footsteps on the path behind her” will change the tempo of the skips.