By Francisco De La Calleja

Given the fact that teaching salsa and other Latin dances remains largely unregulated around the world, it is natural that beginner students starting their own dance journey, advanced students thinking about a career in dance instruction and even other teachers that see me as their natural competition will ask me how did I become and what qualifies me or anyone else, to be an instructor. this is my story:

I began to dance at age fifteen and I immediately appreciated the benefit dancing brought into my life. After following group classes and being in an amateur dance troupe for two and a half years I asked my instructor about becoming a teacher. She said that becoming a teacher was going to be a long process and that I had to be willing to learn every day. In other words, teachers are not advanced dancers. They are eternal beginners. 

To test the waters she let me show choreographies to the newer members of the troupe. I liked doing that but I realized that I was not really teaching, since they already knew how to dance. I was just a glorified demonstrator. Teaching real beginners was going to take more instruction and training.

With that in mind, just about then, I looked for and applied for work in a dance school that provided teacher training to promising recruits. The first stage of the selection process was a four week long intensive dance training program. Each session lasted between two to four hours, five days a week. There was a proficiency test at the end of every week for which the passing grade was 80%. By the end of the four weeks, the group of thirteen dancers that had started had been whittled down to two. After passing the final test with a 99% score, I was given probationary employment but only as teacher trainee.

All the members of the teaching staff had a two hour training session four or five days a week, covering everything from dance concepts, teaching techniques, business training and lesson simulations as well as public speaking, customer service, business ethics, transactional analysis and selling techniques. Excluding dance and business training, that worked out to over two hundred hours of teacher training per year. We were also required to pass professional accreditation tests with international dance teaching organizations. I worked there for four years and only after the first two years I was allowed to teach completely unsupervised. Twice I was awarded the school’s coveted top teacher trophy.

After leaving that studio a former colleague asked me to become the teacher trainer of a salsa and Latin dance school she was about to open. That gave me the incentive to go back to school. Since at the local colleges and universities there were dance performance and creation programmes but nothing in the way of dance teaching; I registered as an independent student at Montreal’s Concordia University so I could pick and choose whatever courses I found useful and interesting. Many of them were of restricted access but as a student I had access to all the university’s resources to learn all I could about biomechanics, anatomy, physiology, psychology, sociology, educational theories, kinesiology and even genetics, all of which can be applied to teaching dance. I spent as much time in the university library doing my own research as I did attending lectures.

During that time I branched out into different dance disciplines such as ballet, ballet-jazz, tap, and also introduced myself to other related fields such as aerobics and rhythmic gymnastics. I followed training courses for fitness group class animation, injury prevention, first aid, children’s group management and dance and gymnastics competition judging workshops. I held jobs as dance fitness animator at a large gym chain and recreational and conditioning coach at a major gymnastics club for almost four years.

In the end, I held the position of teacher trainer at the salsa school for fifteen years, training more than forty instructors, besides teaching as much as forty hours a week of group and private lessons of all levels, from beginner to professional. Since I left that studio and to this day, after forty years of teaching career and having touched the lives of more than twenty-five thousand students, I still learn something useful for teaching as often as I can.

But extensive training and teaching experience notwithstanding, I believe I believe I hold two important qualifications: First, the fact that throughout my dancing career, although I performed and competed extensively, I never ambitioned to become neither a performance superstar nor a competition champion. Every single effort I put into my work had the single-minded purpose of being the best dance teacher I could be. To me, teaching is not a stepping-stone in my dancing career. It is the final destination.

Lastly, I made a commitment early in my career to learn not just from the best teachers I could find or afford, but from every one of my students, good bad, amazing, awful, gifted or challenged. They, teachers, coaches and especially my students and teacher trainees, are the mentors who have made me the teacher I am today.

Most of my colleagues wondered why I never got tired of teaching the same old material to a never-ending stream of beginner students. Every time I took an exchange lesson with a student whom their teacher dreaded to work with, I saw it as a challenge, a puzzle to be solved. Inevitably, I learned something new, whether it was about the student, their way of learning, the dance itself or about myself and the way I could teach.

That is why I believe that my most important qualification as a teacher is that I remain today and for any foreseeable future, a student at heart.