Thread: how to teach teaching?

Ladies/Gents I need your ideas/tips/advice!

I've been asked to come to Russia to teach bellydancers how to teach bellydance classes. Their idea is to have two 3 day courses with a maximum of 20 participants. One course in february/march on teaching beginner class and a couple of months later another course on teaching advanced class.

It's at a big sport/dance institute in Russia and the girl who contacted me is a professional fitness instructor working for the institute. She took beginner bellydance classes with me when she lived here over a year ago and feels I have great dancing and teaching capabilities and says she didn't find that in another dancer/teacher, here or in Russia, since than. Ofcourse I feel very honoured but the problem is I don't have any experience on teaching how to teach, nor did I ever teach beyond beginner class..

So does anybody out here have experience with something like this? I would really appreciate your ideas/tips/advice! I would like to know if and how to do this before I even consider saying yes or no to them. Though it's a great opportunity I want to handle this professionally or else just don't do it.

Thanks for your help in advance!

B

Wow, what an amazing opportunity!

I have only the most limited experience with this kind of thing -- I worked with several of my more advanced students to give them some basic teaching skills. I based my little program on the yoga teacher training I attended.

Some things I did that worked well:

1) I stressed the need for some basic first aid/CPR training for teachers

2) I went over basic anatomy as it relates to bellydance. I cringe when I hear reknowned teachers on DVD calling your upper abs the 'diaphragm' or referring to the obliques as 'hip flexors.'

3) I reinforced the basics of posture with them, and the most common errors I see in students (locking knees, sticking out bum, weak abs, bending backward when lifting chest, overusing back muscles for ribcage work)

4) Most valuable activity, borrowed from yoga teacher training: letting the students actually practice teaching. Speaking loudly & clearly is the biggest stumbling block (surprising, until you remember how fearful most people are about public speaking). For a large group, you'd have to do what my yoga teachers did -- break the group into smaller groups of three. One person teaches a move to a second person, while the third observes & gives her feedback on what was good/what needed improvement. Then the three rotate roles. Meanwhile, you walk around observing the little groups.

5) Another activity that would have to be broken into smaller groups: have them draw slips of paper from a jar that describe challenges. ("you try to do all the moves with your back muscles because you have very little abdominal tone." "You habitually tilt your pelvis," "you have a tendency to lock your knees") Each 'student' acts out her challenge, and it's the job of the 'instructor' to identify & correct their issues.

congratulations on the offer!

but...
kind of difficult to describe in a post... and of course you cant teach people how to teach in two three day weekends...

ok, that's not helpfull.
i'll try:

maybe start with making a list of what you feel would need to be covered... i dont know like for example if i could set up a teacher training course, this would be in it:

- safe warm up and cool downs.
- health and safety
- general training of the teachers themselves as dancers (drills, isolations, posture, etc)
- posture (the teachers should have near perfect posture and be able to explain/correct)
- basic techniques (first work on the teachers doing them near perfect themselves... then how to explain (and how to explain so people with different learning curves/ways understand, how to correct, common mistakes students make, etc). i'd also would want to observ them actually then teaching this to a group of beginners, and giving feedback on this. (same for warm up and cool down actually)
- lesson plans making
- professional ethics/behaviour
- the "psychology" of teaching dance (what to do with mixed levels, mixed abilities, students with body issues, group dynamics, what can go wrong and how to fix it, etc)
- how to teach the aspects of dance that arent "technique" (performing skills, impro, communication with audience and between dancers) etc
- history of bellydance
- rhytms
- music interpretation
- some history of middle eastern music/instruments/the classics
-... and i'm sure i'm forgetting loads

you'd need to pick your own priorities, or do so with the sponsor/organiser
and then your three days would be like a series of workshops on some of these different topics. will be hard work to prepare for.

good, this topic gets me in the mood to think about the work i'm planning to do with my assisant teachers! fun!

Though it's a great opportunity I want to handle this professionally or else just don't do it.
That sounds like the perfect attitude to me!

Another example for you... The JWAAD Foundation Course for teachers takes place over 2 weekends. It is intended to give teachers the *basics* of safe preofessional teaching practice. The course information is here:
http://www.jwaad.com/teaching.html
That would give you an indication of the sort of material covered, in a similar time-frame.

Everyone has given good advice - and yes three days is very short. Perhaps you could send some pre-course reading? I'd suggest some basic anatomy, safe dance theory and also something on teaching methodologies eg learning styles, lesson planning etc.

Maybe you could also ask for them to each write a one page backgrounder on belly dance from them prior to the course - this would get them thinking about the style they are going to teach and give you an idea where they are.

Get them doing as well as listening - for instance pick a combination with basic moves, layers, weight changes, arms etc (eg hip drop forward & back, hip drop forward & back, push, three steps to the side with shimmy - all with specific arms) and get them to plan how they would teach it to a raw beginner. What skills need to be developed and in what order? What time frame are you going to need?

All the suggestions above are great. I'd also like to add:
-how to structure a class. Goes along the lines of creating a lesson plan. I've been to classes with different levels of structure and I felt that I learned the most in a class that has enough structure to make you feel safe, with enough space for personal growth.

-group dynamics/social skills. Nothing sucks energy out of you like a class with nasty group dynamics going on. Being the teacher means that you're in charge and you have to handle it. Covers everything from how to handle people talking through your explanation, class ettiquette, making sure everyone feels noticed by you, etc.

hey Barbara,

congratulations again (and i'm really just jeallous! i'd love to go to Russia for a long weekend, to teach ;-);-))

BUT, after much consideration i'd like to add the folowing "but"...

if it was me, i'd want to make sure that they know at this sport/dance institute, that you can simply not turn a gym teacher or even a beginning bellydancer into a bellydance teacher overnight...

just saying cause i recently got a request from a fitness instructor, who seems to think that after a few private lessons with me she'd be ready to "add" bellydance to her teaching repertoire... euh.. NO! and actually that's already happened to me several times. and they really did not want to take no for an anwser and refused to understand that it does not work like that. they seemed to see it as just a limited set of a few "new moves" that couldnt be too hard to learn and that they could add to their own movement repertoire, teach it, and call it bellydance classes.

so maybe it would work better this way: rather than offering a weekend to these dancers leading to some kind of certificate or telling them they are ready to teach after, is to frame it as just a few workshops? but the topic of those workshops (see all the lists above) would be teacher training workshops? and you just pick the ones you feel most confortable with/experienced to teach.

also, i'd want to consider possible language problems. it's one thing to teach dance and make do with gestures (we've all taken workshops like that), that might work for technique/choreography with a visiting egyptian instructor, but for a teacher training workshop, there is, in my experience, much more TALKING, listening and note taking, and discussing, evaluating, etc involved... needing a lot of language. and i'm assuming you dont speak russian and you would want to find out beforehand how good the students' english would be.

Artemisia

Thank you all for your input ladies, this really helps!

Artemisia: Exactly what I was thinking: they might want to turn fitness instructors into bellydance instructors. So I immediately said those girls need at least a couple of years bellydancing experience and there should be admission requirements for the course and luckily they agreed.

But than which requirements are needed and how do you check if those girls meet up? eg for the 'teaching beginner class course' you can require they took bellydance lessons for at least 3 years, but than I feel everybodies learning capabilities are different so one person who took classes for 2 years can be much more capable than another who took classes for 5 years. So I'm thinking about creating a questionnaire which they have to fill in when wanting to attend the course. And maybe even having them send a small clip of them bellydancing.

And about the language barrier: my contact is Russian but speaks Dutch and she will translate so that's not a problem thank god.

I already asked the organizer to put down what they want and expect out of the course in general (they're also organising courses for hiphop, latin dance etc so that might help). I'll just take a look at that once I get it and see if I'm willing and able to meet up to that. But it's nice to have some things figured out before hand so thanks again ladies and any additional info/advice is welcome!

B

The language barrier seems like a big problem to me.

If you are relying on someone else to translate everything for you, you have no way of knowing that what you are saying is being expressed properly/fully, you have no way of checking that what you have said is being fully understood. It's hard enough teaching dance to people who don't share your language (and I have taught abroad, and two of my classes are held in a university where over half my students do not speak English as their mother-tongue, so I am aware of the difficulties that presents). But at least with dance, you can observe what your students are actually doing, and you can make your language more expressive with physical cues.

But we are not talking about teaching dance, but about teaching how to teach. In my experience, of being trained as a teacher, and of observing other teacher training in action, there is way way more talking and discussion and verbal interaction involved, than when you are teaching dance. The concepts that need discussion are specialised and require more than "conversational" language/translation skills. If you cannot check that they have learned what you are telling them, if they cannot demonstrate their understanding of the material you are presenting to them, if you can't verify that they can apply in practice the skills you are teaching, there is no learning. For training to have any validity, the trainer must be in a position to test that the training has worked, in some way. Otherwise, you might as well just email them a PowerPoint presentation.

i've been in workshops where everything was translated and where i understood both languages

- half the time the translator made up her own summary of what the teacher was saying
- it took AGES

if you want to audition who gets in the course, i think videoclip is the way too go. you cant judge dance skils on paper/via questionnaire ;-)