How to Teach the Basics Efficiently - and to Get New Dancers to Your Dance Scene.

Getting new beginners to a dance scene is a crucial thing. The hard thing with that is that new beginners, who hardly now anything about the dance style they are considering to try out, are not eager to commit to a dance course that lasts for months and takes quite a lot of their time and money. However, offering them just some drop-in classes that they can attend whenever and as many times as they wish, has some major weaknesses.

Longer term course that proceed progressively is more likely a better way to learn the essential basics and to adjust the classes to better suit the students. Progressive course is also good for avoiding beginners to implement commonly made mistakes to their basic dancing - and it is a way more difficult to learn away from the once learned bad habits than to put some extra effort to avoid those in the first place. So for a beginner it would be the ultimate best to offer an opportunity to learn slowly but consistently the most important building blocks of any dance, the basics, but at the same time it is understandable why it can be hard to commit to a dance course of a dance style one can't yet know whether s/he likes it or not.

A solution? An intensive beginners course, of course!

That is what we are having in Helsinki's Zouk scene this week and regardless that it is the busiest holiday season going on, the course has really a great amount of participants, most of who has no prior experience of Zouk. I was also happy to notice some familiar faces from our beginner spring course attending the intensive course, because rarely the beginners are willing to take yet another set of beginners classes of similar content. High fives to you! I got especially happy of those dancers with who I might have played a role of getting them to attend (I have to separately mention this beautiful lady who got inspired after reading this blog!). The big amount of participants shows that there definitely is a demand for this kind of courses where the beginners can learn the basics properly but where they don't need to invest a big amount of time and money to. It is kind of a trial period to the new dance style: an easy way to find out whether the dance is for you or not (and whether or not you like the teaching style of the teachers).

I and some other more advanced students of F&A were in the course as assistants: giving some personal feedback and advice to the new students and helping dancers who had missed some classes to catch up with the others. I think having some advanced students in beginner classes is really useful for everyone, both for the beginners and the advanced students as well as for the teachers.

What comes to the beginners, some of the new students in the course already told me that it is really great to have us there, because then they could better understand how the dance should feel like. A beginner still needs to concentrate a lot on the basic steps, the music, following and leading etc. and when you put him/her with another alike, the whole thing gets even harder for both. "It is so different to dance with you than the others!" was a common comment I had. The advanced students can also easily point out the possible mistakes the beginner is doing and therefore help him/her to avoid forming bad habits. It is those small yet so important details that can be easily corrected in this way but that are hard to be noticed by the beginner. In addition, a barrier of asking for advice from another student can be lower than asking the same thing from a teacher.

For the advanced student, on the other hand, being an assistant is a great experience to improve one's teaching skills and abilities to give constructive and helpful feedback. To help others to learn something makes also the advanced student to learn - teaching others has been said to be one of the best ways of learning! Furthermore, going back to the basics again and again does nothing but good to any dancer regardless of their level. The more advanced a dancer the more s/he realizes the importance of improving the basics.

Finally, for the teachers it is useful to have experienced students who you can count on around if, for example, there is couple of new students who are really struggling and therefore need some extra guidance. In situations like this, the teacher can go on with the rest of the group and put the experienced student to repeat the previous step/movement with those who need it (this is what I was doing during the second class). If it is a big group, it is impossible for the teacher to notice everything and to give personal attention to everyone, so the advanced students are also a great help to divide that job.

All in all, I think this kind of format for beginners course is quite workable method. I will be in the course assisting still today, but tomorrow and Friday I will be off - there is a Zouk festival waiting for me in Spain! It has been a good start and there are many really potential Zouk dancers on board, so I hope that many of the new students will get the Zouk spark from the course and join our Zouk family! If you have some feedback you'd like to give from the course, or you'd like to share your ideas of learning the basics more efficiently, feel free to contact me.

See you on the dance floor!