B.A., Ed.M.
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
As a dance educator, I embrace students of all abilities and backgrounds. Recognizing my dancers’ boundless creativity and embracing their unique personalities creates an inclusive environment of trust, respect, and discovery in my classes. I value effort and commitment in my students and encourage self-confidence which I believe helps them to develop high self-efficacy for learning. My genuine desire for all students to succeed inspires me to be challenging yet supportive each class, hold my students to high standards, and promote progress and equal opportunities for every learner.
I believe in challenging my students by setting developmentally appropriate objectives and facilitating a rich creative process while assessing students, giving feedback, and adjusting material appropriately. I carefully plan technical and artistic, student-centered lessons that challenge a student’s body and mind and uphold the four cornerstones of the National Core Arts Standards (NCAS) for Dance: create, perform, respond, and connect. When planning for instruction, I develop choreographic tasks and exercises that require students to use critical thinking and problem-solving skills to create artistic work. Through careful planning and differentiated instruction, I guide each student to synthesize and connect their understandings within and beyond dance to other subject areas and their individual experiences with the world around them. I recognize that the majority of my students will not pursue a career as a professional dancer; engaging in a well-rounded curriculum that involves viewing and interpreting professional masterworks, experiencing the creative process, and participating in performances will help to cultivate an appreciation for the art of dance beyond the dance classroom, encouraging a life-long engagement with the arts.
Dance is a valuable tool for educating the whole child emotionally, intellectually, and physically. Dance inherently nurtures valuable character-building and cooperative skills beyond the dance specific technical and choreographic skills. Social-emotional competencies are inherently developed in dance class activities. For example, engaging in choreographic tasks that involve group work, choice making, and receiving/incorporating feedback develop a student’s ability to understand other perspectives, appreciate a range of abilities, receive constructive feedback, and compromise effectively building skills in social awareness, self-management, relationships, and responsible decision making. As students apply these skills to other situations, they become resilient, mature, and thoughtful citizens of the world, which is essential in today’s ever-changing environment.
