Why Good Children's Dance Teachers Are Important
Tiffany Henderson with Amanda Scott
If you look at the demographics within your dance studio business you will find 90% of your enrollment is comprised of dancers ages 2 - 12. Often times, when you first open your studio you are a “one woman show” and as your enrollment grows, classes are added to your schedule. Soon you are teaching 10 hours per week, 25 hours per week, 40+ hours per week in addition to all the other tasks it takes to manage your business and it becomes overwhelming!
I am here to remind you that being a “one woman show” as a dance studio owner is not sustainable. You are only one person! If you are teaching all the classes yourself, you simply cannot manage your business in a way that it can grow. Good children’s dance teachers are the pathway to growth for your business. They enable you to step away and improve work/life balance. Dance teachers are the lifeblood of any dance studio and will make or break the future financial and emotional success of your dance studio business.
To put it lightly, finding good children’s dance teachers is difficult. Dance is a niche market and our pool of qualified dance teacher applicants is sparse and sometimes non-existent. This is because dance teachers come to us with different backgrounds and training - mostly with little to no “preschool” or “school-aged” dance teaching experience; they prefer teaching high school and/or advanced dancers. Dance teacher applicants may have limited skills or little professional dance training or they only proficient in select styles - Modern or Advanced Ballet, for example. In addition, dance teachers sometimes have limited teaching availability due to second or other full-time jobs and geographical restrictions. Finally, most Universities and professional training programs don’t educate or ready dance students for a career teaching preschool or school-aged children dance.
So how do we find good children’s dance teachers? We don’t, we create them. As a studio owner you are proficient in training dancers as young as 2 years old dance steps of many styles. This is proof that you can also train an adult any style in dance with the proper resources and procedures. In my 20+ years of owning dance studios I have found it is not that dance teachers don’t WANT to teach preschool and school-aged dancers, it is that they don’t KNOW what or how to teach them.
Join Tiffany for her next small-group coaching session on Teacher Management this Friday, October 11 at 9:30am PST/ 12:30pm EST.
