Ten years ago this month, The Breakaway gave me my first paid teaching gig. This April, I’m teaching with Joe, a friend and longtime student of mine for his first paid gig, also at The Breakaway (Yay Aaaareaaaaa!!).

Of course, like any dancer who started at their college club, I started teaching for the club as a volunteer almost as soon as I’d completed a semester in SwingCal (Cal’s one-credit student-run Lindy hop course). But I saw being paid for teaching as a real change in expectation.

I have come to see local instruction as the most important teaching out there, and it’s often the most undervalued. Most Lindy hoppers will only ever take classes from their local instructors, and those students deserve high-quality instruction just as much as people who can afford to travel to learn. And while a few towns are graced with one or two world-class pros who are dedicated to their local scene, most towns have a couple longtime folks and a lot of relative newcomers with a lot of energy.

When I was one of those newcomers, I was thrown in the middle of a room without much training. I’ve had a lot of support and advice over the past decade from people like Hunter Demaray, Carl Nelson, Nicole Zuckerman, and Ann Mony. But I’ve also come by some opinions and values through my own experiences that I hope can help to other newer instructors, like: 

Beginners deserve my best

Teaching beginners is, in my opinion, the highest-pressure task, because there’s always going to be a few people for whom I am their first encounter with Lindy Hop. The first class I ever taught was a beginner series, and looking back, I just hope they didn’t have to fix too much later. And while I think there are a lot of ways to teach a great level 1, when I teach beginners, there are a few non-negotiables.

• Talk about history. Obviously. No one should be able to leave the first week of a beginner class without hearing some version of “Black Americans invented this dance, and they invented it in Harlem, and it was done to jazz music, which was also primarily invented and played by Black Americans.” This is not dull and it shouldn’t be off-putting to students. If that’s not an aspect of the dance they’re interested in contending with, they’re not going to find a home in lindy hop. 

• Play the (jazz!!!) hits. I don’t believe in easing people into swing music through other genres—swing music is already fun! Count Basie and Duke Ellington have songs that are not just good tempos for beginners but are also just good songs! Who cares if Shiny Stockings is “overplayed,” it rules. Part of a beginner class is giving students an honest idea of the culture they’re entering, and inviting students to enjoy swing jazz is a particularly enjoyable aspect for me.

• Dance full out. Students, especially beginners, are watching the instructor literally 100% of the time. I learned the hard way that if I say one thing and dance something else, they’re going to copy what I’m doing and ignore what I say. I try to always demonstrate the clearest version I have of whatever I’m teaching, and to make sure what I do and what I say align.

• Have fun! Dance class is so intimidating when you’re a beginner, and it’s easy to feel fear emanating from students. I find nothing eases this more than having fun while I’m teaching. I try to invite them into my own enthusiasm for the dance and their learning, and that gives them permission to get a little more comfortable in the discomfort.

Keep investing in myself

Working on my own dancing was especially important to my teaching for the first several years. Staying engaged with myself as a dancer prevents me from getting too set in my ways, and keeps me from getting bored or too burnt out. And just as the best workshop classes are clearly born from whatever that instructor is thinking about in their own dancing, I find a lot of great local classes are born that way. And I always hope that when longtime students see me working and improving, it shows them how much creative fulfillment is possible for them, too.

Take and watch a lot of class

A couple years into teaching, I got really serious about taking a lot of classes, so that I could experience more teaching styles. I also watched a lot of local classes, so I could observe both the instructors and the students. Now, I regularly take classes in other disciplines, and have learned a lot from how instructors in house and hip hop teach their material. 

Taking class helps me stay connected to the student experience. I try to be as open-minded of a student as possible when taking someone else’s class, and to pay attention as much to how they’re delivering the material as the material itself. I try to notice how I’m feeling as the class progresses, and whether or not that seems deliberate on the instructor’s part. When something an instructor does really works for me (or really doesn’t), I note it and file it away for later. 

Watching class lets me observe how other people respond to different class styles. It’s also easier to see patterns of dancing time and talking time, to notice class flow and management, and to watch students progress (or drown!). When I’m watching and taking notes, I’m often paying close attention to

• How many times the students are getting to try the move or concept

• Whether or not the students are “buying in,” and their general attitude toward the instructors over the course of the class

• For how long they are allowed to practice before the teachers intervene with a tip or explanation

• How teachers use their speaking time, and for how long

• How effectively teachers address questions 

• Whether the teachers can tell when the class isn’t getting something, and how they address it

All of these things factor into my own class planning. 

Teach honestly

I teach with Helen most of the time, and we’ve been teaching together since 2018. Our guiding shared value has always been: if we wouldn’t dance it, we won’t teach it. 

This really pushed us at the beginning, when we were much less mature dancers. It made us ask: What do we do? How do we do that? Are we doing it like that on purpose? Where/who did we learn that technique from? Do we like it? Do we want to teach that, or do we want to change the way we do it first? It revealed a lot of blind spots, and continues to push us to improve.

Teaching what you do requires knowing what you do, and knowing what you do helps you describe it better and more efficiently. This process, more than anything, has really helped me become a better dancer and clearer instructor. 

It also keeps us from inventing convoluted moves for the sake of a class: if a move gets too tortured or is obviously created artificially for the purpose of teaching a concept, we trash it, and try to approach that concept in a way that feels more honest to how we move. 

Treat students like grown-ups

I grew up on a dance company, so I’m a quick study of bodies in motion: I can see most new movements once or twice and get the idea. Most of my students did not have this background, but they probably had something that taught them to track movement: team sports, video or arcade games, visual arts, musical instruments. While this doesn’t translate literally to dancing, it gives most people more of a way in than they realize.

I used to go into classes assuming people needed a lot of handholding, but I found there really is such a thing as breaking things down too much. I’ve taken (and taught!) a lot of classes where things grind to a rhythmless, timingless crawl, and it actually becomes more difficult to put the move or concept back in its context after breaking it down. 

Now I assume my students are capable of whatever I have for them. I show them as much movement as I think they can handle, and only troubleshoot it once I see the trouble. Often it’s in the things that are more difficult to pick up visually, like the nuances of the rhythm or the feeling of the connection, and I’d much rather spend time on that than on teaching a pattern literally step by step. This is an approach I see widely in workshop classes, but I see less often in local series. 

Use jargon wisely

Terms like compression, tension, frame, momentum, etc. all have their uses, but they don’t mean anything specific on their own. I used them a lot early in my teaching because those were the words I heard experienced dancers using; nevermind that I spent years trying to intuit what they actually meant. In fact, no new dancer has a baked-in association with these words the way we use them, and I’ve found more often that when a word like “tension” is used without scaffolding to a clear meaning, dancers invent their own meaning, and end up, well, tense. 

Reducing my dependence on this jargon was also part of my effort to stay true to the roots of this dance. Almost all of this terminology is from the efforts to standardize Lindy hop over the past thirtyish years, not handed down by God or any dancers from the Savoy. I’d much rather use words that are descriptive and useful, especially at the beginning. 

I talk about coming together or moving away, and finding a squishy feeling or a stretchy feeling in doing so. I talk in terms of upper and lower body, shoulders, back, chest, core, hips, knees, balls of the feet, and heels. “Momentum” comes after a lot of “moving.” If I’m going to introduce jargon, I want the concept that the term describes to be already familiar, just ready for a shorthand.

Teach more than the steps

Lindy hop gets a lot of first-timers: people who may never have experienced dancing outside of a wedding, and may never have been part of a dance community. So beyond teaching the steps, then, is teaching students how to take class, how to be a Lindy hop and jazz dancer, and how to be a dancer. I feel a great responsibility to teach all of these as a local instructor, because I want to build well-rounded dancers and community members. 

I hate a clean category, so I’ll admit these categories overlap. But here are a few examples of each:

Class-taking skills include:

• Rotating partners or lines

• Learning by watching and doing

• Taking an adjustment and applying it

• Asking a specific question

Lindy hop and jazz dancer skills include:

• Improvising (“social dancing”)

• Curiosity about the history, music, and culture of jazz

• Feeling the beat and the afterbeat

• Asking people to dance and handling all outcomes with grace

• Participating in community traditions, like the shim sham

Dancer skills include:

• Finding a comfortable way to hold yourself

• Finding a comfortable way to hold somebody else

• Warming up the body before intense movement

• Awareness of one’s own levels of proprioception and range of motion

• Willingness to try new movement

I try to be deliberate about addressing each of these things, especially in the earlier levels. For example: I get students warming up on day one. I keep the class rotating often and getting back to practicing without dawdling. When I teach three swingouts and a circle, I connect that to the concept of a musical phrase and the California routine. 

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Local instructors are many local dancers’ window into Lindy hop. It’s an honor to have that position, and I’m always trying to share what I love about jazz with everyone in my classes. It’s a genuine pleasure every time I get to teach, and it frequently turns around a bad day to get in front of a room and help people learn something new. 

I bet a lot of people reading this are local instructors! What do you love about teaching in your scene?