How to Build a Dance

Recently, Dance educators gathered to enhance our understanding of what it means to think like a dancer or  Think Like An Artist

We looked at the Creative Productive outcomes in the Arts Education curricula for the Dance strand and considered what knowledge, understanding and skills students would need to have in order to successfully meet that outcome.  We determined that students could construct this learning if guided through a supporting structure that allowed for the layering of meaning and the experience of creating. 

Our collaboratively constructed list of steps involved in building a dance is summarazed below.

1. Set the Stage
   • create a safe learning environment where students support each other and are encouraged to take creative risks.
   • include a short movement warm-up that provides an opportunity to focus on one particular element of dance.
   • this also allows for the assessment of prior knowledge & need for differentiated instruction.
2. Get Inspired
   • explore, interpret, brainstorm based on curricular themes through a story, poem, film, painting, photo, or current events or personal experience, etc.
   • experiment and observe  creative movements that respond to the subject matter and mood
3. Define the Purpose
   • co-construct criteria to bring student awareness to the learning target
     • encourage variety of expression, student choice & student voice
   • clarify the purpose for creating this dance expression
4. Find a Rythm
   • Movement Instruction
     • scaffold the learning into small movements that build into movement phrases
     • imitate, model, show & tell, experiment
     • include a range of creative movement options
     • count it out or use a beat
   • use dance vocabulary and action words
5. Create a Dance Story
   • explore, experiment, rehearse, collaborate & construct movement phrases to define a beginning, middle and end to the dance
   • access to resources: dance templates, dance cards, action word lists, instrumental music
   • self-assess progress; respond to feedback from peers and teacher
6. Perform for an audience
   • use an audience of peers to share the learning and refine performance through feedback and further self-assessment
   • allow time for revisions and application of feedback
   • inviting an outside audience may occur occasionally when students feel that they have had time to learn and refine and benefit from formative assessment.
   • summative assessment based on co-constructed criteria

By working through this we learned that this is not a linear process and that we can be responsive to student needs by re-visiting the steps above in the order that students need them.  

 Building a dance allows students to learn how to think like a dancer.