This is the podcast for us dance teachers balancing our teaching job with other jobs, commitments, and just life in general! We don't need to know how to run the whole studio, work with students 20+ hours a week, or win big at competitions; we just want practical advice and real conversations about how to be the best dance teachers we can be with the little time we have with our students. Join Maia on the casual dance teacher's podcast and in the casual dance teacher's network on Facebook.
Maia
It's time for another episode of the casual dance teachers podcast. I'm your host, Maia. I'm excited because today we get to talk about us.
We're not going to talk about the students today. We're going to talk about us as casual dance teachers. I know we all have other things on our plates.
We might have other jobs, lives that we have to deal with in general, other responsibilities. Everybody has that. So when are we supposed to fit in planning and put in the time to actually be successful dance teachers? Let's talk about it.
Welcome back everybody. I think that you probably can relate to me when saying that putting in the time and the work to be great dance teachers is not easy. It might be something that we're really passionate about and that makes it easier, but that doesn't mean that there's always enough time in the day to fit all of our responsibilities.
Of course, we know that if we don't have some kind of plan or some kind of idea of when we are going to do our class lesson planning, or at least wrap our heads around what it is that we want to teach from week to week, we probably are going to feel a little bit lost and overwhelmed when we step into the classroom. So let me start by telling you a bit about what I do to carve out time in my schedule every week to plan my lessons. And then we can talk a little bit broader about some of the tips that might help you find your own time in your own system.
At this current point in time, I'm teaching four dance classes a week and each class is an hour long. Over the years, the number of dance classes that I teach on a weekly basis has fluctuated and the amount of time that I spend planning has fluctuated a bit. And I would say that it's gone down the longer that I teach because I have a much better idea of what I want to teach my students on an annual and a weekly basis.
But at minimum, I would say the very, very least that you can get away with, with putting time into planning your lessons on a weekly basis, like what is it that I'm stepping into the classroom and teaching this week would be 15 to 20 minutes per class. So right now, as I'm teaching four dance classes that are each an hour long in my current season, I'm spending about two hours per week, just on the planning that's outside of the time that I'm spending teaching two hours per week, really isn't much in the grand scheme of things. I'm sure we all have those two hours somewhere that we can carve out, but sometimes it just feels like that time is not there and other things come up and it's hard to find that time.
So I've been really intentional about carving out the same two hours every week that I'm dedicated. I will be working 30 minutes per class that I teach just on lesson planning. One of those two hours is in the studio.
So for me, I'm lucky enough that I get to have the studio to myself. When I get there an hour early before the classes that I teach, I understand in some studios, you might not have this luxury, but if there is one hour in the week that you can get into the studio and use it completely free of other people, other dancers and other distractions, that is the absolute best and most productive time. Maybe after your class is a good time to do it.
Things will be fresh in your mind from the previous class. So you can really easily apply everything that you talked about to plan what you're going to do to enhance those corrections and technical assets for the following week. You might also be able to get into the studio early in the morning, if that's a possibility for you or earlier in the afternoon, but I would highly, highly recommend that you make sure to get into your own studio to do some of your planning.
Even if it's only half an hour during the whole week and you have several classes that you're planning for, and you got to cram, cram, cram. Using the studio is great for planning the actual movement that you're going to teach. That's combinations, progressions across the floor, choreography, all of those things are going to benefit from being done in the studio.
We probably all do this. I have done plenty of choreography and planning in my own basement, in my own kitchen, my living room, and that's fine, but you're going to be limited by the dimensions and the space that you have in your home, as well as any obstacles and any distractions. Like if you have your family or pets or even just something lying around that you see and go, Oh shoot, I should clean that up.
We've all been there. We don't want those distractions getting in the way of our movement. So being in the studio completely unobstructed is great for me to create bigger traveling phrases, understand how much space I have to utilize with my students.
If I keep doing all my choreography and all my combinations in my own home, I tend to be a little bit more stationary in my movement. So that's why I like to do at least some of my lesson planning in the studio where I have lots of space to move. I might go in and just start moving freely, put on some fun music and video myself moving, and then find another time to go back and use that movement material in the class for the students.
I might be using the studio time to use the bars or use something in the studio that I don't have at home to really carefully and diligently plan a specific combination phrase or activity. But generally I'm just trying to get as much movement in when I have the studio to myself as I possibly can. My other hour per week of planning is done sitting in my car.
Obviously that I'm not recommending that I'm not saying that's what you have to do, but let me tell you why. And it's kind of a silly reason, but I teach my dance classes one night a week at my studio and on a different night, every week, I have the joy of taking an adult class with my studio owner. It's so fun.
It's really great for me to be in a class where I'm not the teacher and I get to just have that experience of being a student. Now, still to this day, I don't know if my family knows this, so this is going to be perhaps a big reveal, but I always leave for that class an entire hour earlier than I need to. And I just say, I'm going to dance class.
And I come back two hours later instead of one. And in that hour that I give myself that I'm sitting in my car before my class starts, I'm working on planning my lessons. I know that if I don't do that, if I don't physically leave my house and lock myself in my car where I have nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, I won't do it.
It's just, it has to be part of my routine because when I'm home, things are coming up. I realized I have to do the dishes or my son wants to play with me or my husband's asking me about something at work. And that's great.
And I love that. And every single other hour of the week, that's what I'm here for. But that one hour a week, I am out.
I need to go somewhere where I can sit in silence and work on my lesson planning. So because I have that one hour in the studio that I can be working on the movement, my one hour that I'm sitting in is always about taking any notes that I want to take to make sure I know what the flow of the class is going to be listening to any music and making notes about the music that I want to use throughout the class, readjusting my playlists. If I need to reviewing any videos or notes that I took on my own movement phrase work to make sure that I know how I'm going to teach it to the students.
And I think it's really good again, to have at least some of the time that you're planning be just sitting, not moving, because if you spend too much of your time, just trying to come up with phrase work or choreography or the physical aspect of it, you might not be thinking strategically about how you're going to break these concepts down and explain them and fit them all into a framework that really works well for your students. Another nice benefit of sitting down and having that quiet, reflective planning time is that if I run into an area where I feel like I need more ideas, or I'm a little stuck on how to teach the concept, I can use that time to turn to podcasts like this and find something that will help me move through the idea that I'm trying to come up with. I might also go on YouTube and look for videos that will help me teach the concept that I'm working on, or at least enhance the concept that I'm working on, or look at blogs or magazine articles, anything that I can find that will help that's not just already in my brain.
So again, that's my quiet time, it happens to be in the car, because that's the best thing that works for me. For you, if you have even small increments of time that you're sitting in the car waiting to pick up a child or something like that, if you have the house to yourself for a brief period of time, or even if you have those distractions around you in your home, and you can just go into a quiet room and isolate yourself and set a timer, set a 20 minute timer or a 30 minute timer and say, Listen, I need to do lesson planning until this timer goes off, please give me these 20 minutes of peace and quiet. Having a distinct start and end time to when you're doing the planning might help you get into the mindset of okay, I'm focused, I'm not going to do anything else.
And then you know that as soon as that timer goes off, you can then shift your mindset and allow other distractions to come in if they need to. Because I was talking about doing my planning in the car, I'll mention something that probably all of us also do. I think this is a universal dance teacher thing, correct me if I'm wrong.
Do we all do quote unquote, choreography and come up with some of our best choreographic ideas when we're driving, or when we're just sitting in the car and have nowhere to actually do the choreography and see if it works. I'm pretty sure that's a universal, right? So I think we're really, really blessed that we have technology like voice notes that we can just grab our phone, do a quick voice memo with any notes that we can do. You could even turn on your camera and just take a video of yourself explaining the choreography that you just came up with in your head.
This way, you're not distracted from the road or anything like that. But you have some sort of verbal confirmation of what these ideas were. When you come up with stuff like this, as soon as possible, I would highly recommend that you do try to find some time in the studio to go in and play them out as actual movement.
For me, a lot of times, the ideas that were in my head in the car don't quite play out the way that I thought when I actually start doing them, but that's okay. They tend to turn into something fun and exciting. Anyway, it just might not be exactly what I envisioned.
So while the idea is still fresh in my head, I try to find the studio time. Again, make sure that our choreography is not stagnant because we were stagnant when we came up with it, that it moves and it's big and we have the full range of motion and the full use of the space. So finally, I just want to talk about what happens if there's a week where you just don't have time, where things come up, you're overwhelmed, you do not have the time to plan.
My tried and true answer for everything it seems like is go listen to my first episode that I ever posted of this podcast, which is all about planning your curriculum. That is a little more involved planning process that will probably take a couple hours, even several hours. So do that when you have a distinct break and you can take some time to get into it.
But once you do that, I'm telling you the whole rest of the season plays out really simply where you only need 15 to 30 minutes per class of planning. If you do have those weeks that get away from you, don't try to reinvent the wheel or come up with anything too crazy on the spot. You can keep it really simple.
Go back to basics, use one class period to just focus on the basics. If you have students that are old enough and mature enough that they can take some leadership and maybe challenge them to come up with a combination or to apply some of the corrections you've been working on in past weeks, that could be really fun for them. You can throw in some games, make it fun, make it a little bit of a brain break for the students as well as for you, and then pick back up with more challenging material the following week.
I also am a absolute hoarder of notes from all the choreography, all the combinations, every warmup, like seriously, pages and pages and pages and pages and binders and binders and binders of handwritten notes about what I want to teach in class for the past decade. I don't know why because it's not super organized, so it's not like I can really, really easily find everything that I'm looking for, but it has saved me several times. If I'm just totally stuck and I'm like, I do not have it in me to come up with a new combination for this class, but I know I need to do one.
I'll go back and grab a combination I have written down from eight years ago or look at a video from five years ago where I was just improv-ing in the studio and I never ended up using any of that material. And that's what I'm using in class. It does benefit me and there have been plenty of times that I've recycled that past material and just made it new and refreshed it for the class and not had to put a lot of work into it.
So maybe you don't do the handwritten notes. I know that's probably pretty old fashioned and kind of a goofy way to do it, but that's what works for me. I write everything down on actual paper and I put it in three ring binders.
Whatever your system is, as long as you know what the core concepts are that you're working on within a given unit. So that could be within a given month, within a given semester, whatever it is, however you break it up in your head, keep those core skills at heart. And then the rest of it should just flow pretty easily.
Even if you're kind of improvising in the class and you don't have all that time to plan, it'll come to you as long as you put in some of the light work ahead of time. Okay. What did I miss? What do you guys do that prevents burnout, but still allows you to plan effectively and have successful classes week after week? You can find me and tell me more in the casual dance teachers network on Facebook while you're there.
Be sure to give me a shout out of what other topics you'd like to hear from me and give a little appreciation to GB mystical, who wrote my theme music, which I love. And y'all, I found the perfect quote for today's episode. This is a quote from Leonard Bernstein, who said to achieve great things, two things are needed, a plan and not quite enough time.