Week 6 Reflections

Week 6 Reflections

Have you ever watched a spectacular dance like the one in the video clip above and marveled at the incredibleness of it all? The dancers’ feet are moving so quickly with such perfection and in absolute harmony with each other and the music. As a beginning student in ballroom dance, I start to think about how much time and effort and learning must have gone into being able to perform such a dance at that level. So, this week I have decided to discuss the theories of learning that we have been reading about through the lens of learning how to dance.

As a student of dance, I have noticed that though every teacher at my studio is following the same overall dance curriculum and curriculum goals they all have a different teaching style. The teaching styles I believe reflect their different beliefs about learning though they may not realize it or may have never even heard of Cognitivism or Constructivism. Though their methods of instruction may vary, the goal of every dance instructor is to have their students learn the art of dancing and they will design their dance instruction in order to accomplish that goal. As Driscoll (2012) reminds us, “Regardless of the differences among psychological perspectives on learning, an underlying assumption of most is that instruction will bring about learning” (p. 35).

Let us start with what Behaviorism looks like in the world of dance. According to Behaviorism, learning comes about as the learner is confronted with various stimuli that reinforce certain behaviors and learning is empirically measured by the exhibition of certain behaviors (Driscoll, 2012). The dance instructor who takes this view of how learning occurs would provide the dance student with various cues for certain behaviors, or in this case dance steps or moves, and then would reinforce the behavior based on how well the dance went. The important point here is that all learning is viewed as coming from the external cues and training the body to automatically respond to those cues. Behaviorism especially plays a large role in evaluating dance as the majority of judging criteria are based off of defined behaviors such as specific dance steps and moves that the dancer must exhibit.

Now, let us look a Cognitivism. Cognitivism believes that learning involves the mind of the learner. It purports that the mind processes information much like a computer processes information and as such the goal of the instructional designer is to find the best way to program the learner’s mind so that the information is understood and remembered. “To assist learners in processing information, practitioners have incorporated strategies into their instructional designs that direct attention, facilitate encoding and retrieval, and provide practice in a variety of contexts” (Driscoll, 2012, p. 37). My dance instructor, Eric, is a perfect example of a dance instructor who probably has a Cognitivist view of learning. Before learning a new dance step, he will explain it to me and then try to show it to me. Then he will have me try the move with him. We will work on one part of the move and then if I get that we will move on to the next move. Eventually, we will put all the pieces of the move together. If I do not get it, he will come up with another way to explain it and then he’ll start to get very creative with how he demonstrates it. Then once I finally do it correctly, we will go over it many times so that I start to put it to memory. Then later in the lesson after we have moved on to something else, he will have me do the move again to see if I remember it. The next time I come for a lesson, we will review this move and he will see if I can do it a week later. If I cannot, we continue to work on it. If I can, we build other moves onto it. I call this method of teaching “teaching for mastery”, and I must admit that I prefer learning dance this way. His teaching style suits me.

Finally, let us consider Constructivism. Constructivism seeks to provide the learner an environment where they can construct their own learning. One of the tenets of Constructivism is that its goal is to “engage learners in activities authentic to the discipline in which they are learning” (Driscoll, 2012, p. 41). One of the other teachers at my studio tends to lean towards this theory of learning, I believe. Whenever I’ve had a lesson with him, he does not start off with going over what we were going to learn and how to do it. Instead, he would put on a song and start dancing with me. There were always elements in the dance that I did not know but he wanted me to use the moves that I did know and then just figure out what other moves I was supposed to do as we moved throughout the dance. Sometimes it worked out sometimes it didn’t. He would just keep dancing with me until I figured it out. I am somewhat over-generalizing his instruction though as he would eventually stop and explain specific points of technique. His style of instructing a one-on-one dance lesson was very different from how Eric taught it. Frankly, I think that a combination of their two different teaching styles would be ideal for any aspiring dancer. So, I mainly take lessons with Eric, but I still take a lesson with him occasionally as well.

I believe that the three main learning theories are not an “either/or” scenario but rather a “both/and” one. According to Sawyer (2006), modern learning environments are about addressing not only the instruction but also the learner and how the learner actually learns. In the world of dancing, some elements of Behaviorism are needed because the dancer does need to develop some automatic responses that do not require engaging the mind at high levels. The stimulus/response model will work just fine for those situations. Cognitivism can be extremely useful because dancing is by nature a subject that builds on itself. The dancer needs to master certain techniques at each level of progression. Of course, Constructivism is where the dancer is truly able to apply intuition to a learning environment and thus perhaps end up performing a move they had not yet learned or been taught. An accomplished dancer will have encountered all these learning theories in instruction throughout their dancing career.

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Driscoll, M. P. (2007). Psychological foundations of instructional design. In R. A. Reiser (Ed.), Trends and issues in instructional design and technology (2nd ed.) (pp. 36-44). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

Sawyer, R. K. (2006). The new science of learning. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (pp. 1-16). New York: Cambridge University Press.