Tag: dance teacher tips

Ask the Experts: How Do I Better Include Students With Disabilities in My K–12 Class?

Q: How do you approach a K–12 class when one of your students has a disability? A: Growing up watching my deaf sister get left out of conversations made me sensitive to ensuring everyone in my classroom feels included. If you have a student who is disabled, you’ll need to put in a little extra […]

Joelle Cosentino Wants Her Pre-Professional Students to Be Good Humans

Joelle Cosentino is on a mission to shake up dance education with an alternative model for pre-professional training. Because she turned her competition dance background into a star-studded career (she’s worked with Beyoncé, Mick Jagger and Lenny Kravitz), you might think her teaching goals would include a quest for rhinestones and first-place trophies. But by […]

Try These Strategies to Help Students With Coordination

In a contemporary dance class at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, instructor Kira Blazek Ziaii gives a stationary exercise inspired by Countertechnique, the movement system developed by Anouk van Dijk. By directing parts of the body away from each other in space, dancers learn to work with an ever-changing dynamic balance. […]

Vicky Shick Teaches a Contemporary Warm-Up Sequence

Vicky Shick’s voice echoes in the cavernous dance space of St. Mark’s Church in New York City’s East Village. A sinking plié gets a heavy “uhhhhh,” while a swing-and-recover movement is accompanied by a joyous “whoo!” It doesn’t take long for the students to join in with deep sighs and sharp yelps of their own. […]