Do some teacher training!

Ok, dancers, another thing you can do, while you’re not allowed to lindy hop because you might kill someone.

Do some teacher training, on your own or with your teaching team:

• Learn about the history(s) of dances, and how you will integrate that into your classes so it’s fun and useful, and not just a bunch of lecturing at students;

Do an online lecture/tutorial with a dance historian, to get all your ducks in a row and learn about a particular moment in history, or a particular dance.

• eg I once did a private with Loggins to learn the difference between two-step and other dances.
• You could do a session with Teena Morales-Armstrong about black dances from the 50s onward (Hand dancing? Fast Dancing?) so you can stop saying shit like ‘black dance stopped after lindy hop in the 50s.’
• How about a session with Marie N’diaye about chorus lines and what they actually _did_ in their working days?

Do a session with a teacher like Anders Sihlberg about how to structure a class, how to move from a particular move or technical thing to a whole class that’s actually fun;

Do a session with someone like Sylwia Bielec about how to train your staff and structure a syllabus

It’s usually really hard to get these people to stay in one city for an hour so you can drain their brains. Take advantage!

There are other fun topics you could work on:

• Developing a solid OH&S policy that actually addresses sexual harassment in a sensible way (oh, and germ safety :D );
• Putting some affirmative action policies in place, so that you can actually get some diversity on your teaching team: people of different ethnicities, different body shapes, genders, etc;
• Sketching out a funding plan for the next few years to take advantage of any funding that’s coming up (think arts, sport, health, economic development, small business, etc)

And so on.