Teacher Training Program

We’ve Trained Teachers in 40 Cities

In this program you’ll learn the pedagogic concepts and techniques that have helped us become recognised as sought-after teachers, allowing us to share our passion for the dance in workshops all around the world. 

Just as importantly, we have contributed to the vibrant dance communities in Berlin and Heidelberg where we teach weekly classes together with our team. This experience helped us understand both how to work with students long-term, nurturing them week after week with inspiration, as well as high-impact weekend festival teaching. 

In our local schools, we have provided ongoing coaching for many teachers, taking them from their very first teaching experiences, all the way along a teachers’ journey. Some of those teachers have become members of our main team!

Chile (Santiago)
Czech Republic (Prague)
Denmark (Copenhagen)
Finland (Helsinki, Oulu, Tampere, Vaasa)
France (Ardèche, Grenoble, Montpellier, Poitiers, Le Mans)
Germany (Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Munich, Nuremberg)
Hungary (Budapest)
Israel (Tel Aviv)
Italy (Policoro)
Netherlands (Amsterdam, Utrecht)
Norway (Oslo, Trondheim)
Poland (Warsaw)
Portugal (Lisbon)
Slovakia (Bratislava)
Spain (Barcelona, Palma)
Sweden (Göteborg, Malmö, Linköping)
Switzerland (Bern, Winterthur, Zurich)
UK (Durham, Edinburgh, London)

About Ali and Kris

In this program, you’ll get to know Kris and Ali, two passionate swing dance teachers from Germany.

Together, Kris and Ali have been teaching swing dancing to people of all experience levels – from complete beginners all the way to training teachers in our unique teaching methodologies. They have been teaching all around the world: from most cities in Europe, to Israel, Chile and back again. This program contains their best ideas, things that work everywhere for people from all walks of life. 

About Ali

Ali began his career as a chemist in Alzheimer research. After 4 years of being fully immersed in the latest discoveries in Alzheimer prevention and treatment studies, he recognised that swing dancing offers all the benefits of a healthy lifestyle in one single activity. So he decided to dedicate himself to helping busy people live strong, happy and passionate lives through swing dancing.

About Kris

Before Kris dedicated herself to being a Lindy Hop and Jazz teacher, she worked in astronomy; researching, teaching, and sharing with the public. She always loved teaching, and her years of experience with such different topics have honed her skills so that she can break down very complex things into easy-to-understand pieces. Her goal is always to give you as easy a learning experience as possible without watering down the dance.

Click on the image to open PDF

Here you can see all the different topics we will be addressing in this program.

Get a Free Impression of the Program

The Training Program we’ve created is all about helping Dance Teachers become better at what we do, and we’re happy to share a little sample of our program with you…

This sample is taken from our lesson on Goal-Guided Design. We hope that, even without the rest of the lesson, this section will give you insights to help you answer questions like:

• Why are my students having trouble with something I thought would be easy?
• How can I quickly increase or decrease the difficulty level during class to give students the perfect amount of challenge?

Just as in the full program, you can listen to the audio or read the text. 

Feel free to download and share this sample with anyone you think might be interested!

Audio Version

Listen here in this player, or download instead.

Text Version

Structural Complexity

The last component of goal setting we’ll address in this lesson is about organising your structures and models in terms of their difficulty level.

Once at a teachers’ training workshop we asked: “What makes a move complicated?” The answer came back elegantly: “the teachers”. It was funny because there’s real truth in it. The best teachers can take something abstract and complex and convey that information so that others can use it.

To do this translation for our students, we need to develop a good sense for what is easy and what is difficult from the perspective of someone who doesn’t have the knowledge yet. What makes this so difficult is that it’s not possible to ignore your own mental representation, to put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t know what you know. But we can build a sense of what makes something harder to grasp and what makes something easier to grasp. Here are a few observations we’ve made and guidelines we use when determining how difficult something might be.

How to understand what content is complicated and what is simpler

(We’ve ordered these guidelines roughly from most difficult to implement to easiest.)

• Fixed mindset  The words used by the students’ past teachers matter. If their teachers spoke using a lot of “absolutes” (things like “this is how you do it; “this is the correct way”), they have created rigidity in their students minds and you will have to work very hard to bypass these barriers if you want to get new ideas through to your students. A big part of the issue is that the students need to admit to themselves that their past teachers might have been wrong, and thus they might’ve wasted a lot of money and energy learning something they might now need to discard in order to make space for what you’re sharing with them. This is a reality for many teachers who teach at festivals and events around the world, but it also occurs even in small ongoing classes anytime an experienced student begins taking classes with you, so it is important for you to learn skills to handle this situation. Conversely, it’s also important for you as a teacher to continuously promote an open mindset so that you help your students stay open to other ideas and be able to form their own opinions.
• Habit changes  One way many teachers misstep is in assuming a small change to something the students know well will be quick to learn. In Lindy Hop, a common example is when teaching something that uses a triple step that’s different from the type the students have been dancing so far (e.g., a triple step that changes direction instead of continuing in the same direction). Even though the rhythm is the same, and the weight shifts are the same, the moment students have to do this familiar movement differently feels extremely difficult. This is especially noticeable at workshops or residencies, when a teacher finds their “easy” material is difficult and their “hard” material is quick for students to learn. The students already know the “easy” material, but they know it differently and thus they need to use a lot of energy to fight against their habit. Meanwhile the “hard” material might not yet exist in their mental representation and thus, especially if it aligns with what they think they should be learning, it’s easier to learn.
• Multiple layers  If it takes multiple types of techniques simultaneously in order to execute a movement, it is harder than if the movement is based on one simple concept. 
• Number of requests  The more requests you make of your student the harder it is. If you ask students to concentrate on being rhythmically accurate, and express creativity and also smile at the same time, it’s a much harder request than if you just ask them to focus on one of those aspects.
• Concrete to abstract  The more abstract something is, the harder it is to teach. Unfortunately, some of the most precious qualities of dance are also the most abstract –  musicality, creativity, connection and good taste. On the other hand a move with concrete patterns is easier to grasp.
• Time to think  The more time a student has to “recover” from something before needing to make a decision again, the easier it will be to dance. For example, it’s easier if a student can do one move/movement, and stay on that until they are ready to switch to the next rather than needing to make a change every bar or two. 
• Physically demanding motions  Spins, jumps, dips, elongated extensions and very athletic and fast movements are of course a lot harder than movements that are more forgiving to a dancer with less physical skill.
• Symmetry to asymmetry  In partner dancing, mirrored movements are easier to understand than movements that are not mirrored. When both partners have the same rhythm and are moving together it’s easier than if one person has a different movement or if you are going past each other. Rhythmical symmetry is also easier (in both partnered and solo): for instance if a movement takes 2 bars of music and the second bar is a mirror of the first bar, this is easier than if the two bars are different.
• Groove changes  Staying within the same “feel” or “emotion” is easier than changing rapidly between them. 
• Rhythm changes  A simple repetitive rhythm is easier than a movement with many rhythmic changes.
• Direction changes  It’s more difficult to suddenly change direction than it is to continue down the same line.

For example, in Lindy Hop the sugar push can be one of the most challenging of the basic moves (depending on how you teach it). Within 6 beats, there is a “pull” connection, a “push” connection and back to a “pull” to end the move; the triple step is not simple because of these back-and-forth movements. Also, for a moment the dancers are very close to each other but not in an embrace (so they need to decide what to do with their limbs), and in the next they are far away from each other (so they need to control their distance). That’s why this move is difficult. Of course you can teach simpler versions of it, but then you risk forming a mental representation that is too far removed from the reality you want to teach. Also, if you call the advanced and the simple version the same thing, it might be hard to go back and change something from basic to advanced when the students already feel that they know it.

Understanding what makes something easy or difficult is important because it will have a major influence on how you build your class or series of classes. For example, if you want a high degree of mastery on something difficult,

…

One-on-One Business and Career Coaching with Ali

Once every 60 days you’ll get a personal 30 minute meeting with Ali:

• Business coaching – if you have your own dance school/club or are thinking about starting one.
• Career coaching – if you are, or would like to become, a full-time dance instructor.
• Any other topics you feel will help you grow as a dance teacher.

This is your coach:

Ali has been teaching dance since 2006, and has since been invited to teach not only dance, but also give seminars about teaching and business concepts, for dance schools in most cities in Europe as well as many cities around the world. You can find him on youtube by simply searching for Ali Taghavi. 

He founded his first company, SwingStep, in 2010. At any given time, SwingStep has  8-15 full-time employees. Together, the SwingStep team builds festivals and runs local dance schools in two cities in Germany, as well as an online dance school with students from all over the world.

SwingStep has hosted seven residencies, in which dancers have visited for several months to work with the team and learn from Ali and the team to help build their own dance careers. Ali has also personally mentored and coached several more dancers over months and years – many of whom are now internationally recognised teachers and running schools of their own.

Ali has helped people to:

• develop a strategy and path towards becoming a full-time dance instructor.
• improve how they attract opportunities to teach.
• build company structures to run dance schools and events.
• create and manage budgets.
• build teams.
• find productivity and time management solutions for artists who need to juggle many tasks at once.

The events Ali and his team organise have attracted thousands of dancers from all over the world. Every year Chase Festival, with an annual operating budget of 100,000€, has brought in 1200 guests to Heidelberg. SwingSummit is a dance retreat in the south of France; due to popular demand it has run for six full weeks each summer. Beyond these events, the SwingStep team, run by Ali, has organised about eight other small-to-medium events each year.

I’m very much looking forward to hearing about where you are on your journey and where you want to go. Helping you bring clarity to your thoughts and setting up your path is exciting to me. Hope to see you in the program!  -Ali

Pedagogy Group Sessions with Ali

We Want You to Succeed! 

In order to succeed, just getting the information and knowledge often isn’t enough and that’s what these sessions are for: to help you implement the knowledge you gained, to guide you through the special situations that will come up in your daily teaching, and to be there for you when you hit a roadblock.

Get Implementation Support

One of the biggest traps in any training program is that we simply take in the content, often too quickly. To make a lasting change that improves your teaching, you’ll need to go beyond just taking in knowledge and hoping it sticks – you’ll need to spend time implementing, experimenting, and really embedding what you’re learning.

In these sessions, we’ll work together to support you through the implementation process and help you get the full benefit out of this training.  

Get Help with Your Specific Situations

We know that every situation is different. Some elements might be easy for you to implement, but are hard for others, while you might struggle with other aspects that someone has already found a way to solve. This is the place where you can find advice on your specific situation from Ali and from the other participants in this program, and get ideas and tips on how to implement them in your teaching.

Stay Motivated

Not everything will work out the way we want it right away. We’re here for you, so you don’t give up when you hit a stumbling block. In these sessions you will get support from people who know what you’re going through and how hard it can be. You can use these sessions to hold yourself accountable, and get inspired by other teachers’ ways of implementing the material and dealing with challenges.

The Sessions are Live Online and Will be Partially Recorded

These sessions are held live online once a month, and any member of the program can join. We highly encourage you to come and share all your questions and successes, so we can all learn and celebrate together.

Parts of the sessions will be recorded, to share with anyone who can’t be there live. (We’ll curate what parts to share by consulting the session participants, to make sure everyone is comfortable with what’s public or not.)

Get Full Access to Our Online Lindy Hop School

See How Our Ideas Work!

While doing your Teacher Training, you also get full access to our Online Pass. Use this as an extension of your pedagogy training. See how we implement the concepts we teach in this program within our own classes, and get inspired with different possibilities to deliver your own classes. Or, simply use it to train Lindy Hop for yourself.