Best Instructional Practices for Developing Student Choreographers

Drawing on more than two decades of experience refining this teaching process, as well as insights from two consecutive research studies of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago's education work, this article presents best practice strategies for teaching choreography to elementary students in schools. The article outlines the rationale behind the Prepare, Create, Perform, Respond (PCPR) process used with students in Grades 2 through 6, with residencies spanning 10 to 25 sessions (approximately 8 to 25 teaching hours) in Chicago-area public schools. Our programs use universal dance vocabulary, which covers dance concepts (body, energy, space, and time) as well as a set of seven choreographic devices (retrograde, expansion, transposition, diminution, accumulation, canon, repetition). This basic vocabulary is consistent in all residencies, and is linked to each residency's inquiry or guiding question. This inquiry helps identify the specific dance concepts to be used (e.g., size and energies, in the case of a residency focused on form and function), or choreographic devices (e.g., retrograde, canon, and diminution, at a school whose inquiry is shaped around “reduce, reuse, and recycle”) to shape student choreography. This article provides practical application of instruction and assessment practices within the PCPR process.