It’s a gloriously light-touch way of teaching

This is the most important thing I’ve learnt about teaching dance:

As Jane Williams-Siegfredsen, the author of a book on Danish forest kindergartens, puts it: “There’s this thing where the pedagogue needs to stand back sometimes and not always jump in and help the child. They need to let the child overcome problems themselves. We learn so much more from doing that.” (Kids Gone Wild 23 Feb 2016)

I really enjoy this approach to teaching. You give the students a task (use your rhythm to move around the room), and then you let them do it. You don’t interrupt them to ‘fix’ things, you just let them do it, and fix it themselves. They learn so much from this approach.
After you do the exercise, you get together in the group and say “Ok, what did you observe? What was hard? Easy?” You take questions, and you tell them things you saw that you really liked. “I liked the way X and Y stopped and grooved on the spot a bit when they got out of time. I didn’t get run into once, because you’re all being very safe and keeping your feet under your body – I loved that.” And when they ask questions (they will), they say things like, “How do you know when the lead is going to start moving?” and then you add more info about how to be in closed position and how to give and receive information through your body to your partner. After you give that new information, they must dance on it immediately. And you must only say one thing – to the leads, and to the follows.

It’s a gloriously light-touch way of teaching, and I adore it. You don’t see ‘perfect’ dancing right away, but you see people learn to communicate, to lead and follow, and to social dance to music. Most importantly, they keep their own individual style and you can see their personalities come out. It’s also nice because it teaches them to see difficult stuff not as a ‘problem’ or ‘getting it wrong’, but something to figure out and explore with a partner. To me, this is most excellent learning and teaching: you’re helping people figure out that they have the skills they need to learn, and you’re with them as they get started on the lovely long process of dancing.