This weekend all the Summer Institute alumnae gathered for a mid-year meeting at Mills College. It was wonderful to see everyone again, hear teaching adventures, and draw support from a fantastic group of dedicated, kindhearted, forward thinking, dance teacher artists. Below are my notes. Again, and as always, they are my particular, perspective-d extraction of salient points and by no means comprehensive.

Big Picture Questions:
- What really brings students to a dance class? In a public school? In a studio? In a community setting?
- What is the relationship of “creative dance” to “technique”? What is “technique” really?
- As a teacher, there is a huge need for approval that comes at me in different ways and at different ages. How do I respond to that?
- Putting a bunch of step together to make a dance -> Making a dance with meaning = a big spectrum. How do we move students along it?

Big Picture Ideas:
- Followers -> Anti-Followers. In every class there is a wide range / spectrum. How do you bring people in from both ends?
- Structure -> Freedom (Choice). Where do your lessons sit on this continuum? How do you incorporate both?
- In Middle School, starting with the element of shape might feel too much like school. Start with energy instead.
- We spend so much time focused on the kids who aren’t engaged (which often is only one, two, or a handful) and so little time focused on the ones who are. Don’t always focus on the resistance.
- Much of what we do in classrooms has to do with managing behavior vs. actually engaging students. To do this you need to ASK THEIR OPINION.
- Any technical concept has a lot of room for exploration.
- There are some people that just innately self-teach.
- Children are not usually asked to come to the table with their own ideas any more. There is a spectrum when it comes to children’s toys. On one end we have / had Legos (which have now even started to come with instructions) all the way to the iPad with game apps for kids with “right” and “wrong” answers.
- We WANT our students to go way beyond, we want to help nurture a generation that is going to help push the field forward.
- Dance, teaching, and children are all undervalued in our society. So anyone who becomes a dance teacher usually has a lot of passion and courage because you’re usually faced with road block after road block after road block. This is all exacerbated by the fact that there is no dance teaching credential in California. So if you are here, it says a lot.
- If we are all clamoring for dance teaching to be respected and valued the way we know it should be, it also means we all have to step up! And raise the bar in the field and in our own practice. Some dance teachers are perfectly comfortable with the way things are right now because they can safely stay doing what they are doing, comforted by the fact that not much is expected of them.
- It’s important to bring personal issues (like how do I fulfill my creative self and make a reasonable living at the same time?) to the table as professional issues.

The Nitty Gritty (questions):
- How do you structure a K performance?
- If you are working with a young (K / 1 / 2) bilingual immersion class, and there is no one there to translate, what are some effective strategies for showing movement words without modeling the movement for students?

The Nitty Gritty (notes):
- Whenever possible ask the kids directly. Instead of fretting over how to find out info about kids in class from the classroom teachers and IEP notes, and SST notes, and CUM folders, go straight to the horses mouth - ask the kids directly. Have a time set aside in class, or a time when kids can come up to you in private and say “Is there anything I should know about you to help me be the best dance teacher I can be for you?” Same with injuries, carve out some time in class to have kids tell you about any injuries they might have that week or anything that might effect their participation in dance class.
- A nice variation on the Brain Dance can be using a prop.
- Music Ideas: Brain Dance Music by Eric Chappelle
- Music ideas: Penguin Cafe Orchestra
- Music Ideas: Soundtrack to the movie “The Mission”
- When leading an exploration pick good modifiers, the ones that get you the biggest bang for your buck.
- If you are going to give assignments in groups, you need to give improvisations in groups. They have to have experiences making phrases before they can make dances.

- Personal help with the Explore, Improvise, Create, Show model. I get stuck moving from Improvise -> Create.
— During the Explore, focus on fewer words and more modifier (good bang-for-your-buck modifiers)
— For the Improv, have students improvise phrases “_________, _____________, _____________” “explode, walk, rise.” “bounce, roll, jump.”
— Modify phrases with good modifiers.
— Put students in groups and pass out words (words don’t have to be different for every group).
— Have a wild card up on the board that students can choose to incorporate into their dance if they want to.
— Don’t have students read words at the end or have the audience guess what their words were. That’s not the point. If a dance is unclear you can say “I’m not sure which words you used for your dance, can you come up and do it again and be very clear about what you are doing?” If that doesn’t clear things up, you can ask them about their words.
- If dances are unclear it might be a sign to you that you need to to provide them with more improv (phrase making) experiences.

Things I Heard People Say That Resonated With Me:
- “All you need is one ally.”
- On working hard: “If you really want to make change, you’re in the world, you work hard till you die.”
- “If you give people the opportunity to discover and have their own experiences, they are going to way beyond what you think they can do and what they think they can do.”
- “There is value and integrity in dance. What you do is important, it’s not fluff. You have to know that and you have to hold that line.”

Activities:

Activity to keep kids (especially little ones) from falling off the edge of the stage:
- Put blue tape about 2 feet away from the edge of the stage.
- Take kids onto the stage.
- Ask kids to run at tape as fast as they can and then stop before tape.
- Reflect with kids on what they had to do in their bodies to stop.

Dancing a Cinquain:
- Have students write a Cinquain and then dance it:


- Some benefits of starting with a short poem:
- It already has a structure
- The movements can be symbolic or abstracted
- The activity can be a starting point for a dance (then you modify it - for example “Ok, now insert a pause….” etc.)
- Because it’s students own writing they are usually more invested in choreographing the piece.

Variations on the theme of Core / Distal:
- Find a space in the room.
- Start lying on the ground and explore breathe in your body, letting it inform your movement. Guide participants through explorations from small to big (explore breath in your chest, spine, add your arms and legs, now your whole body, now move in the space etc..).
- Now explore:
- rise / fall
- spread / enclose
- advance / retreat
- sudden sustained (time)
- light / heavy (energy - weight)
- toward / away (space)

Collaborative Notes:

Together we served approx. 5000 students!

What was on our minds:

Discussion Groups & Topics:

My Personal Reflections:

- I heard a lot of people mention having to teach fast. And and how important it is to have no “down time” in class. Is having to teach “fast” always necessary? Does every moment need to be structured? Is there room for down time? And what does down-time mean anyway? I find myself teaching fast all the time but it’s rooted in fear. It’s because I’m afraid that if I slow down I’m going to loose control of the class…

- Teachers needn’t feel like victims. I am new to this field, and fairly inexperienced, but one thing I do know is that there is choice involved when it comes to taking on the victim mentality. It is entirely a matter of perspective. I know this from personal experience and also from working with a wide rage of teachers who are all, for the most part, operating in the same tiresome bureaucracy. There are some teachers who are almost always stressed, almost always overwhelmed, almost always depleted and depleting, almost always portraying themselves as the victim of some circumstance or other, and almost always prepared with a litany of reasons for why things just didn’t work out or why there weren’t able to do what they wanted to do. The way they present themselves makes it seem like life and work are continuously conspiring against them, spiraling out of control. On the other hand there are some teachers who exude a very different presence. They are almost always calm, collected, and seem to have a lot of agency and choice in everything they do. I watch these teachers operate in very similar systems, with similar students demographic-wise, in similar school cultures. The conditions are relatively the same but the teachers are completely different, their perspectives are completely different. I don’t believe it’s just the luck of the draw, I really do believe it is an outlook and attitude, that in turn creates and shapes a teacher’s reality.

Language I Hear Being Used A Lot:
- “Leverage”
- “Marry”
- A lot of teacher avoid saying “You should…” Generally it is replaced with some form of “consider.” For example “Instead of ____, consider _____” or “Why don’t you consider_____?”