1. Dance With or Without the Stars
If you're a dance instructor, the way you teach tap dance will depend on a variety of factors including your professional dance background and teaching experience, the talent level and age of your students and the studio or program where you're teaching. Performing as a dancer can certainly be exhilarating, but teaching dance has its own unique rewards.
2. Advance with Age
The age of your students determines how you'll teach dance. If you're teaching a class of three-year-old dancers, you'll need to keep the pace at an appropriate level. Also, when you're teaching very young dancers, you'll need to overemphasize the individual parts of each step so that they can visually understand how to perform it. If you're teaching adult students who are learning tap for the first time, you'll need to adjust your teaching techniques so that you're not progressing too fast but you're not unintentionally insulting in any way.
3. Mixed Abilities
One difficult aspect of teaching tap dance is varying ability levels in the same class. It's a difficult balance to address the individual needs of all your students without negatively affecting the progress of your top ones. Choreographing group routines can also present unique challenges when you have mixed ability levels. For parts of the routine where different dancers are performing different choreography, save the more difficult choreography for your top students. Put your best dancers front and center since that is where most audience members will usually focus.
4. Create a Perfect Balance
Your focus during tap class will also depend on whether your studio has a big year-end dance recital or production or something less formal. If you don't have a formal recital, it's sometimes possible to cover more in class. Your dancers might be able to advance further and tackle more complicated steps if they get to spend all of their practice time learning new steps rather than repeatedly practicing the same routine for several months. If you do have a large production planned, still take some time during class to devote to learning new and challenging steps. Your students' progress shouldn't be hindered because you're preoccupied with a big, upcoming performance. Work on new tap steps for at least 10 to 15 minutes of an hour-long class
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