Teachers in Primary schools are arguably the most overworked teachers in the world. Planning and preparing lessons, responding to issues in the classroom, implementing prescribed curriculum, and reporting fill these teachers’ days.

For dance teachers in Primary school you can add to this list preparations for performances and rehearsal that are often conducted outside of school hours. Reflecting on your own teaching can take a backseat in this long list of immediate and essential activities.

However, reflecting on our own practice as teachers and dance artists is crucial to all aspects of our work creatively and pedagogically. Whether it’s about how we give feedback, plan for leading a creative dance activity or communicate verbally and kinesthetically, it’s important to be able to articulate practice.

Time pressure and the need for solutions can bring about random reflection (on a burning problem) and a solution is proposed before the essence of the problem has become entirely clear (Korthagen & Vasalos, 2005 in Sööta et al, 2012).

How can we effectively observe our own teaching?

How ever we choose to reflect on our own practice it is essential that we reconnect with the situation as it happened in the classroom.

We can do this through

Videoing our classes
Observing colleagues dance classes – reflecting and comparing practice
Keeping journals

Whichever method you choose it helps to have clear frames on which to reflect. As dance in most Primary schools is exploratory rather than a genre specific technique, you will be observing how children plan, express, perform, and respond to their own movement and others physical expression.

Focus for Reflecting on Dance Teaching

Try to focus on a single aspect of your teaching for your observation. This enables you to select snap shots of how you communicate with students, scaffold activities, or promote creativity within your classroom.

Video

Using a video of you teaching in action is convenient as it allows you to observe at leisure. However experience has shown that this can be really time consuming to watch back over hours of footage.

Try to select short excerpts of movement and then examine examples of interest. Video how you explain a single activity to your class to check for clarity of communication. Or alternatively you may like to review how you support students own creativity as you give them feedback.

Reviewing the video footage

1.View the video without comment. Observe yourself from a distance.

2. Write down or verbalize what you would not usually say out loud.

3. View again. Ask yourself questions that you would ask if you were watching another teacher. For example, ‘Can you remember what you were reacting to here?’, ‘What were you feeling?’.

4. Look for alternatives and ‘what ifs’.

(Frisk, 2019)

Observing Colleagues

The collegial support of another teacher is a positive way to frame your own reflection practice. However, time poor teachers seldom have a space in their busy day to sit in on a class.

By videoing your class and then focusing in on a short example, you can facilitate a more time-friendly sharing of practice. Try using the checklist above as a starting point for these focused discussions.

Journal Keeping

Journals are particularly effective at recording the internal monologues we have as teaching artists. They can document ideas for further creative activities, parts of the class that need a longer or more intense focus or identify links to other learning areas.

As a teaching tool, they can act as a reminder of the positive outcomes in your classroom and how they were accomplished. This may also flow onto the creative outputs in the classroom as a blueprint for future movement explorations.

These journals can be personal, or you may also wish to share sections with colleagues to brainstorm solutions or share commonalities. Here is a template for a quick journal entry you could do after class.

Dance and Teaching Knowledge Sharing

No matter which method you decide is appropriate for you, reflection leads to an awareness of the dance teacher’s own practical pedagogical knowledge. It helps to make clear the interaction between dance knowledge and teaching knowledge.

In addition, observing your own and others practice helps develop more specific teaching tools to use in your classroom. In turn this leads to a safe and creative environment for students.

References

Frisk, Anders (2019) Observing one’s own teaching–creating awareness for professional development as a dance teacher, Nordic Journal of Dance.

Korthagen, F. A. M., & Vasalos, A. (2005). Levels in Reflection: Core reflection as a means to enhance
professional growth. Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 11(1), 47
71.

Sööta, Anu & Leijena, Äli (2012), Designing support for reflection activities in tertiary dance
education, The 5th Intercultural Arts Education Conference: Design Learning