If you are aspiring to become a dance instructor or you want to hire a dance instructor, what should be paramount to you is to learn about the qualities that make a dance instructor stand out from the others. In this article, we will look through the qualities a good dance instructor ought to possess.
Hiring a Dance Teacher – 12 Qualities of a Good Dance Instructor
1. Excellent Communication Skills
You cannot become a good teacher without having excellent communication skills. The ability to impart knowledge greatly depends on your ability to communicate. As a dance instructor, when you communicate effectively and clearly, both your subordinate and superior will find it easy to flow with you.
So also, as a dance instructor, when you communicate effectively and clearly, your students will be able to flow with you. So if you are looking for a good quality from a dance instructor, then you should look out for excellent communication skill; the ability to effectively transfer knowledge to the students.
2. Excellent Listening Skills
Another quality that will make you a top notch dance instructor and a good teacher is excellent listening skills. No dance instructor or teacher can be effective if they don’t have listening ears. Your ability to effectively listen to your students will go a long way to help you relate with them. You will be able to do things or adopt teaching techniques that will help you easily impart them with the required dance knowledge.
3. Pleasing and Friendly Outlook
One of the attributes that will endear people to you as a dance instructor is a pleasing and friendly outlook. Expressing a pleasing and friendly attitude towards your students makes you more approachable, and is more likely to motivate students to want to learn under your tutelage.
The truth is that if you are approachable as a dance instructor, students will feel more comfortable to ask questions or communicate their challenges to you. This will in turn enhance student – instructor communication and create a more positive learning environment.
General, the best teachers tend to be open, friendly, welcoming, and most importantly, easily approachable. Something important that comes with having a friendly attitude is the trust that can potentially be created within the classroom. When a student views a teacher as friendly, the student is more likely to open up to the teacher and hence, he or she will be more likely to trust the teacher.
4. Patient, Caring, and Kind Personality
If there is any quality that will make a dance instructor or teacher enjoy his or her job, it is patience – you just have to be patient, caring and kind if you don’t want to get frustrated as a dance instructor or teacher. The truth is that a dance instructor that is patient, caring and kind is likely to be more adaptable to different teaching environments.
By being patient, a dance instructor will be more willing to understand each of these individual students and overall age groups. Of course, good teaching comes with experience; however, having patience will allow the dance instructor to learn and better understand what specific tactics work and do not work when it comes to engaging students within the learning process.
5. Respectful Attitude
Another good quality that a dance instructor should possess is to be respectful – displaying a respectful attitude. You should know that respect is reciprocal hence if you do not show respect you are not going to be respected by your students.
Please note that you are not expected to respect only those who are older than you, you should also respect people that are younger than you. Respect is all encompassing, you respect people’s privacy, you respect their choice as long as it does not disturb your class or other students, respect people’s religious views and everything they hold dear.
6. Excellent Work Ethic
Having an excellent work ethic is a significant quality a good dance instructor ought to posses. A good dance instructor never gives up, and especially not on his or her students. Having an excellent work ethic will always show on your students and the delivering of their work.
As a role model, having an excellent work ethic will help your students to develop strong work ethic as well, and it will help them put in all that is needed to learn the dance skills that made them enroll under your tutelage. With good work ethic comes professionalism, responsibility, and preparation. If you want to have a good work ethic, you have to take responsibility for everything, including your students’ possible misbehavior within classroom settings.
7. Excellent Organizational Skills
A good dance instructor must be a good organizer. Being organized plays an essential role in being a good teacher, and is a very important quality of a good dance instructor. Trust me, without organizational skills, a dance instructor will not be able to maximize time, they will struggle with deadlines, expectations, and tasks.
8. Discipline Skills
Without discipline, success can hardly be achieved – discipline is what makes a anybody stands out from a group. As a dance instructor, one good quality that must not be missing in you is discipline skills. When you are discipline, you will be able to take instructions from your boss and supervisor and follow through the instructions without compromise.
Being discipline will help you carry out your job descriptions without falling short of expectations of the organization. Discipline will help you spend time to study on how to do things better and faster in such a way that will help the organization maximize profits.
9. Positive Mental Attitude
Positive mental attitude is a key requirement for anybody that desires to be a good dance instructor. Positive mental attitude puts you in a position that enables you see positives in every misfortune.
A person with a positive mental attitude believes that there is always light at the end of every tunnel, and that the rainbow will always come after the stormy rain. That of course can be attributed to you as your personal brand and students will be free to share their challenges with you.
10. Continuous Personal Development
If you truly want to be a good dance instructor, then you must not take continuous personal development lightly. It is continuous personal development that can help you enlarge your capacity as a dance instructor worthy of emulation. As part of your continuous personal development, ensure that you read dance related books, watch dance related videos, attend trainings, seminars and workshops et al.
11. Adaptability and Creativity
Another good quality a good dance instructor ought to have is adaptability and creativity skills. With adaptability and creativity skills, it will be easy for a dance instructor to easily learn new dance skills and be creative enough to impart it to his or her student. The truth is that when it comes to dancing, there are always new dance steps and any dance instructor that is not ready to adapt or be creative will fade away with time.
12. Humility
Humility is yet another good quality that a good dance instructor must possess. Humility is a virtue that can take you from the lowest cadre in your workplace to the top; it has helped loads of people achieve their business goals.
You can be competent and smart, if you lack humility, in most cases you will find authority figures resisting your promotions. So, if you want to become a good dance instructor, then you should be humble; let people know you for your sincere humility.