Today I found a great way to bring my not-so-secret past as a competitive latin dancer* together with my enthusiasm for research into teaching and learning. As those who know me through the mainstream education world will know, I’m fascinated by how students learn and how we help teachers learn how to teacher better.
I met up with teacher-to-the-champions Mr Graham Oswick, who along with some wonderful other teachers** did his best, many years ago, to inject some form of technique and style into my remarkably resistant body.
We had a chat about what teachers, students and competitors might learn from the most up to date research about how the brain learns***. Stemming from that discussion, here are 6 ideas from my reading of some cognitive science literature*** that I think might plausibly transfer into more effective teaching and learning in ballroom and latin.
I should note – I’ve not tested these and I’d love to hear if anyone has conducted some high quality research. Also, if any cognitive scientists would like to correct any mistake from my inevitably non-expert interpretation then I’d really welcome your input!
- When learning something new we have a limited working memory that can reliable hold about 3 to 5 ‘chunks’ of information at any one time before we feel overwhelmed and overloaded. For novice dancers each ‘chunk’ may be small movements, single steps, movement of one muscle. However, expert dancers have learned to combine multiple ideas into more complex mental schema which can be accessed as a single chunk, allowing experts to build up more complex ideas that would overwhelm beginners.
- Suggestion: limit the amount of new steps and ideas you focus on at any one time when learning something new to avoid being overwhelmed by an impossible learning task. For new ideas, steps or technique, playing music, dancing with a partner or being aware of others watching you may be factors that overwhelm or impede learning as they all take part of your attention and therefore working memory.
- It’s tempting to try and learn and practice dances in chunks. This is known as massed practice. e.g. where you focus on all of the Samba for 20 minutes before moving to Rumba for another 20 minutes. However, cognitive science shows us that long-term memory of dances is stronger if we interleave practice. Oddly, it has been shown that by giving ourselves a bit of time to forget an idea then, even though the next time we try to remember it will be harder, the long-term strengthening of memory of this approach is much greater than repeating the same ideas back-to-back.
- Suggestion: even though it feels harder, you’ll end up with stronger memory of routines is you interleave dances rather than doing massed practice of repeating one dance several times before moving to the next.
- One of the most frustrating problems in dancing is where you remember a routine and technique in the studio but where it goes out of your head in an exam or on the competition floor. One element of the problem is clearly related to stress but another issue could be related to the idea of transfer. This is where the learning of an idea is strongly associated in your memory with a particular location, environment, music, and so on. Learning science suggests that we can help overcome this by mixing up our practice and learning in all sorts of different ways, to ensure that the only common factor is the actual core idea that we’re focused on, rather than letting it get bound up with other factors.
- Suggestion: mix up practice in as many ways as possible to strengthen your learning and adaptability. Try different music, different tempos, different locations facing different directions. Start at different points of the routine. Wear a variety of practice wear – heavier and lighter.
- A common way to teach ideas in dancing is for the instructor or teacher to demonstrate an idea by dancing it themselves while the student watches. However, learning science shows that novices are very likely to have attention focused on some of the wrong aspects of the demonstration. Another issue is that the act of processing the moving image also takes up valuable working memory which takes attention away from the key aspects being demonstrated. Research has shown that students often learn new ideas better from a series of still images where the key aspects are simply and clearly highlighted and where details that are not important to the key idea are de-emphasised.
- Suggestion: work hard to focus attention on the key aspects being communicated. During teaching demonstrations you could perhaps attach something brightly coloured to the area of focus. Another idea is to use a series of still images (or, even better, simple line drawings) and talk through them using a highlighter to show the key areas of focus.
- Research suggests that the most successful students are constantly engaged in self-talk – internally re-explaining what they are seeing and experiencing to make sense of it. Less successful students do less of this. This mental process helps to create the links between practice and theory – i.e. between the what and the how and why. In more successful practice and teaching, students are encouraged and helped to engage in self-explanation, e.g. by pausing frequently in demonstrations or by being given worked examples with gaps to fill in.
- Suggestion: during lessons and practice, make time to verbalise both the sequence of steps and the logic of why actions are taking place. Repeated demonstrations are less effective than switching back and forwards between instructor-narrated demonstrations and student-narrated practice, or even student-narrated demonstrations.
- Suggestion: during lessons and practice, make time to verbalise both the sequence of steps and the logic of why actions are taking place. Repeated demonstrations are less effective than switching back and forwards between instructor-narrated demonstrations and student-narrated practice, or even student-narrated demonstrations.
- One of the more effective ways of learning is to see two concrete examples of an idea or practice side by side and then work with a teacher to identify key differences. It is significantly more effective to be able to see ideas side-by-side than it is to watch one example and then another, especially when key aspects can be put right next to each other and highlighted.
- Suggestion: use video to capture the teacher and the students dancing the same moves to the same music, then play back side-by-side, pausing and slowing to emphasise key aspects of difference. Stills from both might be used on-screen with a digital highlighter to emphasise key differences in shaping, or slow-motion used to show differences in rhythm or size/volume of movement.
To re-iterate, these ideas are taken from general literature on cognitive science, not from any specific literature on learning or practising dance. However, they do seem to be generally applicable in a wide variety of settings and learning so I hope they might start a useful discussion among ballroom and latin dance teachers, students and competitors about improving the way that steps, techniques and routines are taught and learned.
Anyone fancy exploring this further?
*In case of scepticism, here’s a video of me dancing with the lovely Leah Rolfe back in 2007 – should be noted Leah has gone on to much greater things since finding a significantly better partner in the amazing Adelmo. I also danced with other amazing partners such as Sharon Withers, Sarah Farrell, Laura John, Georgina Weeds , to name just a few.
**Other amazing teachers included Bruce Richardson, Vicky Cunniffe, Lorraine Kuznik, Neil Dewar, Ian Waite, Karen Hardy, Luca Sartori and Goran Nordin, Margaret Redmond and several others. I’m ridiculously grateful to them all, even if I’m no longer dancing.
*** These ideas are all taken from Ruth Colvin Clark – Evidence-based training methods where you can also see references for all of the research quoted.
Note: the image used as a header for this blog is cropped from an original by Ailura (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org
/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons – from https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File AJive_Langella_Moshenska_1107.JPG
