Do you know what your priorities are in your ballet classroom?
For today?
For this unit?
For this year?
For next year?
Have you checked with your colleagues to see if their priorities are similar, completely different, or even in conflict with yours? An example: if one of your priorities is to get all of your students turning on the highest demi-pointe possible for their individual anatomies and your colleague's priority is to get kids practicing with a turn board every night, you are in for a seriously uphill battle. Those two priorities do not play well together.
Clear priorities are important for everyone but they are especially important for leaders. If you are the studio owner, you need to know your priorities and you need to clearly communicate them to your employees, your students, and your students' parents. If you are the ballet director, you need to clearly communicate with the teachers you supervise and make sure everyone knows what the priorities look like at the level(s) they are working with.
All teachers are leaders. You lead your classroom. Your students trust you and follow your advice and example. They literally follow your lead. Do you know your priorities? Have you told your students?
It is pretty common to want to work on more than one thing at a time. I don't mean multitasking, I mean wanting to work on more than one long-term goal at a time. Things like creating a classroom where mistakes are embraced as a necessary part of growth and learning, making sure your students have enough feedback and opportunities to practice so that they can all perform double pirouettes in your next spring show, helping students explore and deepen their relationship to musicality . . . stuff like that.
Sometimes we hold long-, medium-, and short-term goals at the same time. For example, in Level 2 my long-term goal is correctly engaged knee muscles during rond de jambe, my medium-term goal is to help my class get their extension to at least 60º, and my short-term goal is to refine pas de chat. I can work on all of those in the same class.
We can be working on multiple things at once and experience success. But we can also be working on multiple things at once and experience a sense of spinning our wheels or, even worse, losing ground. When the second thing happens, there is usually one reason:
We forgot to tell people our priorities.
Teaching ballet can feel lonely. We're the only adult in a room full of kids (adult classes are obviously different). We rarely get to hang out with other ballet teachers because we're all always teaching. I imagine owning a studio feels even more lonely. And because we feel lonely, we fall into the trap of thinking that as long as our lone brain knows the plan that all will be well.
But dance is a team activity even when the team is as small as a soloist + coach. We need to tell people our priorities. Tell your students what you are working towards. Tell them often. They need to hear it more than once. It's not that they are blowing you off, it's that they have priorities of their own as well and it's just hard to remember everything.
Tell people your priorities over and over.
Drastically, almost painfully over-clear is so much more helpful than vague.
If you want help with selecting priorities, the Geeky Ballerina curriculum has them built in.
Every level has a key principle and a key vocabulary. Those are your long-term goals.
Every level has clear expectations to advance to the next level. Those are your medium-term goals. You won't always be able to work on them from the first class, but by mid-way through your year, they should be on your radar.
Every unit has new vocabulary. Those are your short-term goals.
You don't have to reinvent the wheel if you don't want to. There is a system ready for you. And you have students who are so excited to have you as their leader!
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