What does a Brain Compatible Dance Program look like?
The topic for the blog today is what a Brain Compatible Program looks like in action. This blog will tell you what to look for when seeking out a developmentally appropriate dance program for your child and how we offer this learning model at Illusions Academy of Dance.
What does a Brain Compatible Dance program for developing children look like?
According to Andrea Trench of DiscoverDance, A Brain Compatible Dance program will have a few essential characteristics. We will dive deeper into two of the characteristics to look for to start below.
Have a meaningful curriculum: The first goal is to create a meaningful curriculum so that students understand the art of dance. Class objectives are clear and progressive. This program will see, respect, and appreciate children where they are. The foundation will prepare students for their evolution into creative, intelligent, and thriving life as a human.
Have a developmentally appropriate curriculum: Another goal is that class objectives are challenging yet achievable. The curriculum meets the children where they are developmentally. Using the Bloom’s Taxonomy Model, we can assess student knowledge and growth. The Bloom’s Taxonomy chart, created in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom, shown below shows three low-order thinking skills: remembering, understanding, and applying. These are the simplest skills required for deeper comprehension. Before a student can master a skill they must first remember the objective, understand the objective, and apply the objective. The higher-order thinking skills located at the top can be achieved once a student completes the first three stages. During this time, they can analyze, evaluate and create using that objective. When creating class curriculums this model ensures students are fully comprehending the information presented. It also allows the dance educator to assess and evaluate student growth. If we approach our early childhood classes with only specialized skills, our students will remain in the stages of the lower-order thinking skills and will never experience full comprehension. Early childhood dance education should not be about mastering specialized dance steps, but rather about learning the concepts of the movement needed in order to master.
“Education must be increasingly concerned about the fullest development of all children and youth, and it will be the responsibility of the schools to seek learning conditions which will enable each individual to reach the highest level of learning possible.”
Below is the Bloom’s Taxonomy model that supports the developmentally appropriate curriculum at Illusions Academy of Dance. The examples in the pile and speed diagrams depict how the knowledge is applied through each stage of skill comprehension. You can see that students will progress through the curriculum to gain full comprehension of each concept presented.
Dance educators provide students with many opportunities to do creative work when they rearrange and modify elements of movement to create dances. The choreographic process gives students a way to interpret their ideas through movement sequences just as painters manipulate lines, shapes, and colors to create artwork. In order to dance or participate in dance-making, students must first understand how to communicate through movement. (Trench) Once students understand how their movements portray meaning, they can further explore and investigate dance-making and choreographing to communicate. Students will be more efficient at communicating if they are given avenues to explore these skills. Likewise, through participation in dance, they can expand on this 21st-century skill. (Burgess, 2018)
At Illusions Academy of Dance, students are provided a sequential curriculum that is heavily based on fundamental principles of early childhood development. Through movement exploration, our youngest students begin to remember dance concepts through repetition and exploration using instruments, props, rhythm sticks, parachutes, obstacle courses, and more. These young dancers explore creative movement principles through developmental movements. Students participate in the Brain Dance derived by Anne Green Gilbert. According to Gilbert, the Brain Dance® is a full body-brain exercise based on developmental movement patterns that healthy human beings naturally move through in the first year of life. These movements help to integrate reflexes that are the foundation for healthy brain development. The movements develop our whole brain (brain stem, mid-brain/limbic system, and cortex). As babies, we did these brain-developing movements on the floor. As children and adults, we continue to review these patterns in a variety of ways to keep our brains and bodies strong. Cycling through these patterns daily or weekly may also fill in missing gaps in our sensory-motor system due to birth trauma, lack of floor time as an infant, or illness or head injury as a child or adult. As our students mature they take these elements and apply them to execute movement patterns with conceptual knowledge. Furthermore, our dancers begin to understand and apply the concepts being explored using higher-order thinking. Once those concepts are comprehended, mature dancers are able to further analyze, evaluate, and create using their knowledge and the choreographic principles of dance.
Check back on The Dance Stance with Miss Lauren soon for more important features of the Brain Compatible Program here at Illusions Academy of Dance!
Miss Lauren
References:
Burgess, Lauren. The Effects of Dance Integration. 2018.
Green Gilbert, Anne. Creative Dance for All Ages: A Conceptual Approach. Human Kinetics, 2015.
Trench, Andrea. www.discoverdance.com