By Francisco De La Calleja

Congratulations, you are a dance teacher. What could be better than making money sharing your passion? You are a good dancer, a performer or competitor even.  So you wanted to make a living from your dancing or maybe you just wanted others to benefit from your experience.

You may have already noticed that it is not easy to build a student body that will ensure a steady income and that getting and especially keeping students is not as simple as it first appeared. It is perfectly normal to ask yourself if you are doing it right or if there is something amiss in your new career. Here are some clues that indicate that you may need to upgrade your teaching skills:

In class you spend time “fixing” and “working on” many things.

Do you feel like you are wasting your time on things the student should already know? This happens either because you are improvising or because your teaching method is not organized in a logical sequence, creating the need to go backwards in order to correct, fix, and work on ideas that were bypassed in the learning process or were not fully explained to fit the student’s learning profile. You need to analyze your curriculum and lesson plans and map out a logical teaching sequence adapted to your student’s needs.

You have students that can learn only from you.

This doesn’t mean you are a great teacher. It means your students are suffering from “teacher dependency”, a learning disorder caused by instructors that teach how to dance but fail to teach their students how to learn. Your charisma may be the cause of an affinity between certain students and you but you may be losing other students because of it. It points to the fact that you may not know enough about your students and how they learn. Both you and these students have to open your minds to other systems or personalities.

You “challenge” your students learning abilities.

This is what happens when teachers realize they cannot make the learning easier and instead of working harder to find a way to save their students time and effort they turn it into a challenge. If you do this it means you are transferring to your students the responsibility of understanding the teaching and learning process. Experience and better understanding of it and of how teaching dance actually works will alleviate the need to challenge your students.

You attract too many male / female students.

Occasionally your class may not be balanced and students from other groups or levels have to be invited to dance with those students without a partner. But if more than half of your students in most of your classes are dancing with an invited dancer you have a problem. Either your teaching system is skewed towards leaders or followers or you have a professional image problem.

Your students dance exactly like you.

This means you are teaching your students how you dance, rather than teaching them how they can dance. You need to work on your goal-setting skills as well as your customer service mind-set.

If you recognize one or more of these points in your teaching it may be time for you to invest into becoming a true professional instructor. After all, you already spend a lot of time, effort and money into your dancing.

If you are going to teach, learn how you can be the best teacher you can be. Remember, anyone can show steps to someone who already knows how to dance. But to keep your students happy and motivated you have to be the instructor that makes a difference. Contact us for information about our teacher training program at www.shedanceswithhim.com