A Good Teacher Is An Improving Dancer

Many teachers are teachers because they are great dancers. Few teachers are teachers because they are great at teaching. If you are reading this blog, you probably count more into the second or at least want to become part of the second group. But great teaching alone doesn't cut it. Throughout all articles on this blog I advocate to do what you say. This applies to demonstrating at the same time as explaining, this applies to failing, and something we rarely talk about, the most basic aspect of teaching - continuing to progress. Here are three tips that helped me:

1. Train!

As simple as that - you teach your students to improve themselves and tell them to train. Get yourself access to a floor with a mirror on the wall and train!

2. Train with focus!

Just because my time for training is not all day, unlike before, I feel like I don't have time to waste, and thus train with goal. Train for a show, repeat class or workshop material or do the Total Swing Experience series. Training with a goal has drastically improved the quality and results of my training and I promise you will feel it too!

3. Train regularly!

A bit more than a year ago, I trained about monthly (hardly ever) - now I train a couple of times during the week. Together with training towards a goal, this makes training powerful!

As nice side effect to improving you will be more believable and motivating for your students.

Matching - More Than Mirroring

"Treat people like you would like to be treated" is an old german folk-wisdom, suggesting that people should be nice to each other. When it comes to actual interaction, psychology suggests the proverb should be changed to "Treat people like they want to be treated". Treating people like they want to be treated is called matching. The possible applications for teaching are wide-spread.

Physical Matching

Matching happens naturally physically. This means that the changes of tention are matched. You can see this when people shake hands, but also inside of our body we are naturally programmed to match ourselves e.g. when we walk our arms swing relaxed, when we jog the arms match by gaining more tention and raising. This natural tendency of matching physically can be used as technique as used by more and more people. As with all natural abilities we have, we can cultivate them, to react more sensitively and act more clearly.

Mental Matching

Matching, as suggested in the introduction, can be used for mental activities - for example when we talk with someone or a whole group. Breaking it down to various matching possibilities, you can match people by using the same vocabulary as they use. That means most of the time simple english for american and english teachers abroad.
Another possibility is the kind of thinking you underly your talking with. Is it based on reasoning (why?) or the outcome (what?) or the execution (how?). Try to cover all of them to talk to all of your students at some point in a way it matches, so they can most easily understand you.

Matching applies to a wide range of actions, and can be utilized in many more ways than above described. So go and try implementing matching somewhere!

How would you use matching in your class? Share in the comments!