In nine out of ten tango classes I have attended I have experienced how good dancers, eager to transmit their knowledge, have talked so much and given so much information, that I after ten minutes were more confused than clarified. Often, in these situations I can see other people suffering from severe information overload just like me (they get pale, uninspired and frustrated). I have seen this over and over again, and for that reason I rarely take classes anymore.
I have experienced
classes where the teachers were killing the class by talking more than 50% of
the time, but why is all this talking a problem? One would think that teaching
is about explaining and therefore it’s natural that the teacher jumps to the
conclusion that “the more I talk the more I teach” but it’s wrong:
Teaching is not the primary activity in a class, learning is!
But with teachers talking so
much learning becomes very difficult for the student. Focus has to be moved
from the teacher to the student, from the teaching to the learning process.
Seven, plus or minus two
In 1956 the
cognitive psychologist George A. miller published the article “The Magical
Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing
Information” in which he describes the limits of short-term memory and working
memory capacity. In his research he presented a person for a number of stimuli
to which there was a corresponding response (learned before). Performance is
nearly perfect up to five or six different stimuli but declines as the number
of different stimuli is increased. This means that a person can perceive up to
six information’s and keep track of them but more than six is more or less a
waste.
How many information’s
are not given in just one instruction in a tango class: left foot there in this
angle, lead with your chest, remember to wait for the follower and all this together with the information’s about the sequence, the student is supposed
to learn.
The second
cognitive limitation Miller discusses is memory span. Memory span
refers to the longest list of items (e.g., digits, letters, words) that a
person can repeat back immediately after presentation in correct order on 50%
of trials. Miller observed that memory span of young adults is approximately
seven items. And since the information needs to enter working memory before it
can be stored into long-term memory, the teacher has to organize his teaching without overloading the short-term memory.
It’s
clear, that most teachers are unaware of this. A consequence of should be that a 60 minutes tango class should consist of cycles of
instruction, demonstrations, practice, feedback and correction distributed on:
10 minutes
of instruction
10 minutes
for demonstrations (visual information is better than logic information)
10 minutes
for feedback, questions and corrective instructions
30 minutes
for practice (trial and error)
For all
teachers (not only tango teachers) this means, that the value of their teaching
not is in the quantity but the quality, and that quality is defined by what you
say and demonstrate and even more important what you leave out – what you don’t
say. A good teacher understands that not everything can be told and that the
student can absorb very little information.
Five classic mistakes made by tango teachers
Mistake No
1: The preframing is poor or non-existent. The teacher takes it for
granted that the students know what it’s all about but the student need
headlines on what is going to happen, what the goal is and what they can expect
from the class.
Solution:
In the beginning of the class explain the topic and the goal of the class, and
what the student can expect to learn and not. This releases working capacity
memory which would otherwise have been occupied by asking (consciously or
unconsciously): what is this about, why are we doing this, what is the goal, why is
this important?
Mistake No
2: The teacher forgets how long time they spend to learn a certain
technique and expects their students to learn it faster than they did
themselves. As a consequence the program for a class is too comprehensive and
not meeting the needs of the student.
Solution:
Open your eyes, look at the student and start the teaching at his or her level.
Be flexible: if you see that your program is too complex, change it.