Q1 Light by Amber Heaton; amberheaton.com
For Seasoned Teaching Artists: Reflection Questions and Inspiration for the Semester Ahead
As we prepare for the coming semester, these questions can offer opportunities to consider, reflect, and grow.
I want to thank my colleagues Leah Cox (Associate Dean at ADF and Associate Professor at Bard College), Debra Knapp (Director of Dance at New Mexico State University), and Elizebeth Randall (professor at Saint Mary's College of CA and teacher at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center) for contributing ideas for this post. These three artists serve as great inspiration to me as thoughtful, vibrant teaching artists. As Elizebeth posed, "Do you have a practice of self-reflective writing for yourself and/or your students? If so, how does this inform and transform your/their experiences in class?"
We encourage you to use these questions - a few or all of them - in a way that works for you. This might take the form of weekly journaling, silent reflection while commuting home one day a week, discussions in staff meetings, or participation here on the blog in a dialogue.
In the coming weeks, we will pose these questions on the blog and on the Life as a Modern Dancer Facebook Page. Either way, you can share your thoughts related to the weekly reflection question as well as read about others all around the country.
Here are many questions for the semester ahead:
1. How do you want to grow as an educator this semester? What are some ways that you have changed, grown, or developed as a teaching artist in the past year? What excites you about these changes? How are you continuing to learn/grow/develop/change?
2. What are you excited about in your work/program?
3. How is teaching a beautiful thing? How is learning a beautiful thing?
4. How does the energy of your students fuel you? What are your students teaching you?
5. What are some of your obstacles (personal or logistical)?
6. How are you employing creative problem solving?
7. How are you authentic with your students? How do you know?
8. How are you caring for your teaching body, mind, and spirit?
9. When was the last time you were in a dance class? When taking a class, how do you shift out of teacher mode and into student mode? How does taking classes inform your teaching practice?
10. What resources (books, music, articles, etc.), if any, are you using to guide your teaching practice? How are you integrating your personal study of teaching into your practice?
11. What are you “leaning into?”
12. What’s feeling static/stale?
13. When was the last time someone observed you teaching and offered feedback? What kind of feedback is useful to you?
14. Do you have opportunities to observe other teachers? If so, how has this informed your practice? If not, do you think this would be beneficial to your practice?
15. What’s going well? What are some of the highpoints of the semester so far? What has been the journey of this semester?
16. How can you go deeper with the material?
17. What do you love about teaching?
18. How do you encourage your students to develop and use agency/choice making in their dancing? How do you navigate the possible contradictions between agency and form that can arise in teaching any dance tradition?
19. How is teaching informing your performing and choreographing? How are performing and choreographing influencing your teaching?
20. What unique qualities and strengths do you contribute to your school/department/program/students?
21. How do you help to empower your students to be more present and alive on their journeys? How do you do this for yourself?
22. What kinds of recuperative practices have you established for yourself and/or your students? What kinds of recuperative activities do you offer your technique students when they need a break from technique?
23. Are you keeping joy, curiosity, and playfulness alive in your work? How?
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