Devon Youth Jazz Orchestra

There are so many jobs that I do where I turn up, teach to a certain piece of music, with the planned steps, and leave again. Although this one may have been a little different it wasn't until I had been there a night that I realised how beautifully this tied in with my university work!
A colleague and myself had been asked to go to a residential centre in Devon on Thursday night, in lieu of teaching them a routine on the Friday morning.

The only difference being... not a single person had previously taken a tap dance lesson!

The people we had been asked to take this class with were the Devon Youth Jazz Orchestra who thought it would be fun for someone to come in to teach them tap during one of their residential weekends.
As these people were beginners, my colleague an I had free reign on what we could teach them: this is where my syllabus vs free training has a part to play.

We chose not to go down the syllabus route as this may have been a little degrading to find out that this is what 5 year olds start with, regardless of the fact they have never done tap before, and for the fact we only had them for a short amount of time, syllabus work means that there are many small combinations to learn, which could be a little overpowering for someone who has not tapped, and potentially be quite tedious.
We chose instead to teach them a few steps that we deemed basic (although some of these do not appear until the vocational syllabi at the end of the ISTD training system) and carry on by teaching them a slightly longer routine which may better reside in their heads.

I found teaching an entire group of complete beginners very interesting. None of these aspired to be a professional tap dancer in any way, but there were some individuals in the room that did want to succeed at what they were given that day, and there some, even working in that short while that showed great potential.

The routine we taught was not the easiest of routines and would not have been deemed appropriate for a grade 3 student (many of those in these classes were 11 and 12 years old, it would not be uncommon for this age student to be in a grade 3 class). I cannot say, by any means that those in the orchestra class would be as technically sound as people who had danced in a syllabus class, but I cannot speak for all, and technique was not focused on in the 1.5 hour lesson that each orchestra group had, therefore I cannot say whether this could be improved upon over time.

Having a free class allowed us to get through a lot of work in short amount of time and kept the students interested and alert as everything was new and they had to concentrate if they wanted to know what to do.

I think it would have been very interesting had I been able to continue with regular classes for Devon Youth Jazz Orchestra to see how things went over a period of a few weeks. But for now I would say that not doing syllabus work was the best choice to get as much out of the kids that we had, therefore, in my books, 1 up to free work!