Teaching at Dancebreak - Instructor Guidelines

Why is this important?

At Dancebreak, our goal is to support the flourishing of the Stanford social dance community and create a welcoming space for all dancers. We love to see both veterans and newbies expressing themselves, improving their dance, and having fun! In order to promote that growth and connection, we all need to work together to provide some stable foundations, and instructors are a huge part of that mission.

After all, the lesson is the first hour of every Dancebreak! Instructors set the tone for the night, so we need your help to bring a supportive structure for the night.

Lesson Goals

Principal goal: The primary goal of Dancebreak is to get more people into social dance and create dancers who are fun to dance with.

• Above all, safety is important! Emphasize safe technique and give safe alternatives/“bail-outs” where possible (e.g., “holding the pizza box” over the head on turns).
• Emphasize connection, frame, and quality of movement. All techniques and variations should be grounded in connecting with the music and the partner, rather than memorizing steps.
• Encourage technical growth. Adjust the lesson content and pace to the appropriate level of your dancers; not too easy or too hard. If dancers are struggling with a move, focus on it until ~90% of the class can do it, and cut things from the lesson if needed.
• Foster creativity and build intuition around “dance grammar.” We want students to leave classes with a deeper understanding of the dance, so that they can continue exploring on their own during the social and beyond.

Expectations for Instructors

BEFORE THE LESSON

• Find a teaching partner. Each lesson should have at least one experienced instructor, so if this is your first or second time teaching with us, please pair up with a veteran. If you don’t have a partner in mind, the Dancebreak admin team can help you find someone.
• Reach out to the Dancebreak admin team to schedule your lesson. We will also check your instructor duo and/or help you find someone.
• Prepare your lesson plan. Write out which techniques you plan to cover and which songs (including BPM) and activities you plan to use to teach these. Lessons should be an hour in total, but it is a good rule of thumb to plan for ~50 minutes, to allow for transitions and unexpected pacing.
  • Dancebreak is building an archive of sample lesson plans that you can borrow/modify, so reach out if you would like any help with this!
  • Our current catalog is available here!
• Send the admin team a draft of your lesson plan. ~10 days before your lesson, send us what you are planning, so that we can review and give feedback before the lesson.
• Rehearse your lesson plan with your teaching partner.
  • Suggested: Trial the class on a beginner student. You’ll be way better at explaining things if you find a friend who would be in your target skill range and spend 15 minutes giving them a private lesson. That way, you can see what mistakes a student might make and have the appropriate responses queued up.

DURING THE LESSON

• Reinforce the Dancebreak lesson goals. As stated above, emphasize safety, connection, musicality, technique, and creativity.
• Avoid gendered terminology around Lead/Follow and around role responsibilities
  • Leads suggest, steer, and help shape – Leads are not dictators and listen to and trade ideas with Follows.
  • Follows interpret and contribute – Follows respond to what is being led and convey their own ideas and styling.
  • We do not espouse “it’s always the Lead’s fault” – this is unfair to Leads and disempowering to Follows.
• Be lighthearted when possible! Good vibes are key to maintaining care for technique without inaccurately emphasizing correctness.
• At the beginning of the lesson, briefly check/mention the dance shoes policy. All dancers should be wearing socks or dance shoes, not street shoes. If anyone isn’t, give them a gentle reminder.
• Call for partner changes often. Rotating every 30-90 seconds of dance (and after every dance segment) is a good rule of thumb. When you get really into a topic, it can be easy to forget to call for rotation, but dancing with different people helps everyone learn better.

AT THE END OF THE LESSON

• Demonstrate the techniques you taught in the lesson, talking through the content and then dancing through a short snippet of music (e.g., 30-60 seconds). This allows students an opportunity to film and review techniques later, and it also gives inspiration for how to incorporate the new techniques socially.
• Discuss social dancing consent.
  • Model how to ask someone to dance (e.g., “Hello, would you like to dance?”) and how to respond. (e.g., “Yes, do you prefer to lead, follow, or switch?” or “No thanks.”)
  • Emphasize that “No is a complete sentence.”

Curricular Guiding Questions

• What am I about to set loose on the social floor? How will intermediate/ advanced dancers respond?

We want people to be able to continue learning through socials, so we want to set people up to be able to dance with more experienced dancers and to have a good experience. This will be better facilitated by making sure that more experienced dancers are able to help support new dancers, so setting content so that experienced dancers are able to discern between intentional creative choices and “mistakes” is key. Vocab and shapes should be clear and common enough that everyone has consistent expectations.

• What broader concepts and characteristics are we seeking?

Heavy focus on connection and listening. We prioritize this over “vocab” but use vocab as context to explore ways to connect.

• What does progress look like?

Offer an explicit framework for what progress looks like. (If you don’t give one, people will construct their own.) People often assume good dancer =  large vocab/many variations, so we should offer an alternative view. Being a good dancer is having a good sense of connection (comfortable to dance with) and communication, progress looks like having brain space to think about new ideas

• What will people implicitly practice/learn?

Model and bake in things that are hard to teach explicitly: musicality, connection, and creativity. Choose music that matches the moves and count in dancers to start at the beginning of a phrase.

Instructor Qualifications

We want as many people as possible to feel comfortable teaching dance (at Dancebreak and beyond!). To that end, we have very few prerequisites for becoming an instructor. However, to make sure you have the support you need to ensure your and your students’ success, we do have a few guidelines:

• Instructors should regularly do the dance style they intend to teach at events that are primarily that dance style. For Waltz, this includes Dancebreak and Friday Night Waltz; for Lindy, this could be SSD or Wednesday Night Hop; for West Coast Swing, this could be Cardinal Swing, Mission City Swing, or Sharky Swing.
• Instructors should be cognizant of the fact that the best dancers are often the worst instructors (at first), because they’ve forgotten their own experiences learning how to dance.
• New instructors should partner with experienced instructors their first couple of times teaching, to get a feel for the pacing of the class and common questions students ask/common issues students have.
• Instructors should follow the tested lesson plans laid out by Dancebreak, especially for beginner and intermediate lessons. More advanced lessons provide more flexibility.
• Most importantly, instructors should also regularly attend lessons taught by others. There are lots of Lindy Hop, West Coast, and Latin lessons in the Bay Area, and attending them will improve your teaching and your technique. Richard Powers sometimes lets people watch his classes from the balcony, which is another good way to learn how to teach dance. Especially try to attend classes that challenge you, so you can get back into the student mindset.

Lesson Plans

For some example lesson plans, see here

Additionally, here are some suggestions to consider when designing your lesson plan:

• Maximize practice time, minimize talking time.
  • The worst dance classes are ones where the instructor talks a lot
  • The best dance classes are a sequence/progression of drills that increase in difficulty, this allows people to discover things on their own while music is playing by trying. Dance is best learned through experience, not spoken word.
  • If both teachers like to talk, a simple method to avoid overtalking is: During the song, agree on one instructor to teach and give instructions for the next song, then start the song and repeat. You can both talk if you’re good at coordinating and avoiding overwhelming students.
• Rotate often
  • 30-90 seconds per song before rotating partners (rotate partners immediately after every song ends)
• Plan a sequence/progression of drills
  • 1st drill the simplest version of what you want to teach
  • Formulate drills as a challenge “if you can do drill 1, can you do drill 2?”. Examples of drills that form the next step in a progression:
    • Drill 1: Leads press into your partner’s hand to prep a turn. Follows verbally say whether they think it will be a single turn, double turn, triple turn, half speed turn.
    • Example of a drill progression (drill2 ):
      • Shoulder shimmy move (with demo) + Small shoulder shimmy with a pause in between each one (these are combined because they’re easy and can be done solo)
      • Prelead small shoulder shimmy (with a partner)
      • Prelead slow or fast shoulder shimmy on drum beats of the music.
    • Give self-diagnostics: If I can see them from where I am, they’re too big. After each shimmy, see if your partner matched you. If not, you’ll need to …
  • Only present 1-2 new things at a time to focus on per song to avoid overwhelming
  • Max 60 seconds of talking to explain/demo the drill (if it takes longer, you need to choose more granular drills to give students more time in the music).
  • Exception: If you’re teaching a new pattern or step sequence, it may take a couple of minutes to explain before they’re ready to do it. Invite students to copy you as you step them through it, instead of showing them all the steps, then having them try to replicate several steps in a row.
• Use a high-energy warmup to get people engaged fast
  • e.g., Copycat circle (groups of 4, one person is the leader for 32 counts and everyone copies them, then rotate who the leader is)
  • Start music immediately and have people dance while latecomers trickle in
• Create a playlist
  • Check that songs are in Richard’s bpm range: https://www.richardpowers.com/dj-tips
  • Check that songs have a clear beat without weird phrase changes.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Maiya Yu for guiding the creation of these guidelines, which we adapted from SSD and Cameron Schaeffer for feedback and wording suggestions in the “Lesson Plans” section!