Dance Instructional Guide

Dance Effective Practices

Skill

Canyons District Best Practices (Instructional Priorities)

What it looks like in Dance

Instructional Agility: Teacher makes appropriately paced intentional corrections and feedback constantly based upon listening and observations.

Instructional Agility: Class moves at a quick pace, active participation is maximized, teacher makes constant corrections/feedback based on observations. Learning Choreography/Composition: In dance classes, students will learn and perform choreography. Here are some examples of how this would look: ● Student performs the choreography incorrectly : Suzie, you are performing that movement on the wrong count. Camie, can you tell me what count we are supposed to hit that on? Yes, we are supposed to hit that on 5. So Suzie, what count do we do that on? Yes 5. ● Student performs choreography correctly : Excellent job, Camie. Can you show me how you can make that movement even bigger? Excellent, do it that way every time! Creative/Choreographic Process: In dance, students learn how to create their own movement vocabulary. Here are some examples of how this would look: ● Student fails to create new movement: Okay Maddie, let's get the creative juices flowing. Can you show me a shape? Good, now how can you take that shape traveling through the space? Excellent, now you have created something for your project! ● Student is successfully creating new movement (adding another level of complexity): Great job Anna, how can you do that spiral turn and take it into the air? That looks so much more interesting and adds a lot of depth to your choreography. ● Students physically demonstrate the movement to show their level of mastery. ● Students count out loud as they do the dance. ● Choral Response ● Cold calling ● Thumbs Up/Down ● Specific Peer Feedback ● Grouping based on ability, keeping choreography within ● the students’ zone of proximal development. ● Making modifications to choreography to help simplify or push students to the next level.

Instructional Agility & Feedback Cycles

Feedback: ●

Provide timely prompts that indicate when students have done something correctly or incorrectly. Give students the opportunity to use the feedback to continue their learning process. End feedback with the student performing the skill correctly and receiving positive acknowledgement. Provide timely prompts that indicate when students have done something correctly or incorrectly. Give students the opportunity to use the feedback to continue their learning process. End feedback with the student performing the skill correctly and receiving positive acknowledgement. Actively engage ALL students in learning; students are active of they are saying, writing, or doing. Pace instruction to allow for frequent student responses. Call on a wide variety of students throughout each period. Present information at various levels of difficulty. Use data to identify needs and create small groups to target specific skills. Frequently analyze current data and move students within groups depending on their changing needs Explicitly teach a skill to students by explaining, demonstrating, and modeling. Build the skill through practice and use, to gain automaticity.

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OTRs

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Scaffolded Instruction & Grouping

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● Examples: (Since becoming a dancer is all about skill development, AAA is done throughout rehearsal) ● Teach skills through demonstration, explanations, examples on the board, teacher modeling

Instructional Hierarchy: AAA

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