A.P. arts teachers professional development weekend

Teachers should never stop learning. Never stop seeking the truth and refining their understanding.  This weekend the instructors at Academy of Performing Arts took a 12 hour professional development course with Prisca Winslow, a nationally renowned Feldenkrais Practitioner who is known for her work with dancers and dance teachers. 

Through this workshop amazing new insights were opened up to us on how to approach movements and how to understand the connection between the physical and emotional. Prisca encouraged to really identify and understand how the body moves properly. We were encouraged to shift our paradigms around dance training to improve the way we teach movement patterns. We discovered so much about how dangerous popular dance teaching methods can be. 

This workshop has inspired us as a teaching team! we are committed to molding ourselves into teachers who can provide a safe and knowledgeable environment of dance, and providing our students a style of technically correct training that will let the body move, rather than force it to happen through “old teaching methods”.  This is the third professional development course we, as a team, take this year and we are comitted to continue to train, learn and grow alongside your dancers.

As parents you entrust us with your children, and whether they are just having fun or training seriously we want you to feel confident that we are teaching purposefully, with proper corrections and a sense of joy so that your dancer will not only enjoy dancing but will safely dance with a foundation of proper technique.

Amber Vasquez