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How long should a private lesson be?

Posted 10/31/2018

By Francisco De La Calleja        


    I am often asked what is the optimal duration of a private lesson, either for a single individual or for a couple.

    There are some instructors who claim that a private lesson of less than two hours is basically a waste of time, effort and money. According to them, at least two hours are needed to supervise the repetition of exercises designed to train the muscle memory necessary to execute whatever new movement is introduced during class.

    These instructors stand in stark contrast with the overwhelming majority of instructors in our industry, who work with the quick and expedient forty-five minute to one hour lesson format. In this case the lesson is quickly over and the teacher is certain to remind the student to go practice before their next lesson. The usually recommended amount of practice is three hours of social dancing or in-front-of-a-mirror drill for every hour of instruction.

    Dance satudents have a right to question who serves them best, the “pay me to make you practice” instructor or the “you have learned something new, now go and practice it” teacher.

    As usual, since private lessons are as varied as the goals and objectives of the students who take them, there are no absolute answers.

    Although I usually work with the standard one hour lesson, I believe there is a way to get the same benefit from a longer lesson, under certain conditions.

    An effective private lesson should usually include a warm up, an evaluation period, maybe a short review of whatever elements the student needs in order to absorb a new idea, followed by a concise introduction to whatever is being introduced as new material. This should leave just enough time to review and reinforce to make sure the student is able to perform their new –or corrected- concept before class is finished.

    Most importantly, a private lesson needs to be planned in advance. No matter how much time the student is willing to invest, it will be wasted if the teacher is just improvising.

    The instructor that sells the concept of a two hour supervised practice lesson has ostensibly the well-being of their student in mind and seeks to protect the student’s investment of time, effort and money.

    But his system also raises several questions: First, if the student is able to understand the new material easily, why is the student’s muscle memory in such need of training? Especially by repetition. And if the reinforcement period is not simple and massive repetition but a series of progressively detailed explanations, does that mean that the initial explanation was incomplete and needs to be upgraded as the student gradually achieves proficiency? Would either of these two processes occur if the student –for whatever reason- has a hard time grasping the first new idea?

    On the other hand, there are a few realities teachers have to work with in private lessons of one hour or less. First: Nobody practices as much as they wished they did. So, to be safe, most realistic teachers start every lesson with the idea that the student has not practiced and probably will not practice at all after class.   Second: The student’s body will not have time to “learn” a new way of moving. Therefore, teachers have to teach it using the movements it already knows.

    So, for a short lesson (or a long one) to be effective, a teacher should introduce new material once they understand the student’s learning process. This is done by evaluating their experience, perspective, motivation, ability and intelligence channels. A tall order indeed, since it requires great communication skills, but worth working on. A teacher that does so can introduce new material in a way that will be easy for the student to grasp intellectually, functional for the student to do physically and that will be made of movements or concepts so intuitively grounded in the student’s natural movements, that they will not require a massive amount of practice time to feel proficient.

    In conclusion, a planned lesson by an instructor who evaluates all aspects of the student’s learning process can be effective no matter how much time is invested. The progress will simply be proportional to the time. An unplanned lesson by a teacher who only evaluates his students by dancing with them or by looking at them dance risks being unsatisfactory, no matter how long it is.