Starting Module 2

Principles Of Professional inquiry

I have to say that upon reading through the hand book and reader 4, I felt rather overwhelmed by the prospect of choosing a topic to form my line of inquiry. There are so many aspects involved in my role as a dance teacher, how would I decide on just one area to focus on? The answer lies in the process of discovery I am about to embark upon through the theories and research discussed in Reader 4.

I am studying on BA PP Arts as I would like to improve the quality of my work and my career prospects, I hope to eventually work as a lecturer in a practical sense in either further or higher education. I also like the idea of being an Arts Journalist, but this will perhaps more likely become a hobby for me! I am currently predominantly a Ballet Teacher however I am qualified and experienced in many genres of dance, in the near future when my degree is complete I also plan to work towards my ISTD Licentiate in Imperial Ballet in order to take my work in Ballet to the next level.

There are many areas of my profession I would like to develop further, these include: Choreography, class management, developing student's confidence and performance skills, ways in which to increase student's musical awareness/appreciation as well as continuing to develop more effective teaching methods. In order to identify these areas I brainstormed and created a diagram of headings incorporated in my role as a Dance Teacher, I wrote all the aspects I could think of in order to establish some options to explore. As you can guess, I have now possibly ended up with too much! (But it's better than not enough!)

Brainstorming diagram:

The first task for me is to devise a set of questions to establish a potential topic to form my inquiry. To allow me to decide what questions need to be asked, I reflected upon areas of teaching I find challenging and considered what aspects I struggled with myself as a dance student. What areas did I not understand and why? I often ask myself what could my teacher have done differently in order to address certain issues effectively?

I recall always struggling with my confidence, which resulted in affecting my performance. At the time I feel that my teachers assumed that maybe I wasn't serious about what I was doing which was not the case. In light of this, I have always strived to create a positive learning environment, to always be approachable and encourage communication to establish a good student/teacher relationship. I feel that this has been a motivation for me to develop understanding of individual circumstance, I would like to develop this further.

Skills in creating Choreography I feel are crucial in the effective delivery of successful training. When choreographing a piece I call upon past experience and also my influences, had I not had such a wide range of training and been taught by lots of different teachers, I feel I would find my skills very limited. Having said that I do run out of ideas and would like to broaden my abilities in this field.

I considered effective teaching I had received which has influenced my practice today, one particular teacher who I trained with for my ISTD Modern and Tap teaching qualifications, (who I plan to interview as part of my inquiry) encouraged me to develop a good musical education in my students. As a huge music fan myself, this made perfect sense, a lot of children's awareness usually only stretches as far as current chart music and Disney songs. In order to vary in styles of choreography and enhance performance it is necessary to provide background knowledge of the era, culture, heritage and genre to ultimately produce a more versatile performer. I plan to discuss this further with this particular teacher during my interview.

So I feel I now have a starting off point and a few several aspects to explore, through this reflection I have developed my questions which I plan to ask my two employers a Dance Teacher, a Drama Teacher, as a fore mentioned I plan to ask one of my teachers from college who is an examiner. Finally, I feel it would be interesting to interview two of my students one young, one old (with the permission of my employer and their parents of course!) as this may throw up further areas for research.

Task 4a

Here are a set of questions I have devised in order to help lead me to explore a potential topic further. My questions will obviously vary depending on who I will be asking, these questions are for my 2 employers and also my former tutor for CDE (Alex, Jon and Rachael):

• As a teacher, what do you find is the most challenging aspect of your practice?
• What areas do you find are the most difficult to develop?
• How would you differentiate the approach to this regarding different age ranges?
• What teaching methods do you find useful for developing performance skills?
• How do you build confidence in your students?
• And do you find this helpful in encouraging their sense of performance?
• What factors do you consider when selecting music for a piece?
• Do you have a particular process or formula when creating choreography?

Possible questions for my students, 1 senior, 1 junior:

• What parts of the lesson do you enjoy the most and why?
• What do you least enjoy and why?
• Do you prefer syllabus work or free work and why?
• Who are your role models in dance?
• What is it about these individuals that you like?
• What do you understand by ' a sense of performance?'

I look forward to receiving the answers in order to aid my research.