Why Is Everyone in Such a Rush to Teach?

Okay, This one might piss some people off. This is gonna be a long one because I have a LOT of thoughts on this, grab a cuppa and let's get into it.

 I feel like I'm seeing more and more dancers go from taking classes to teaching classes VERY quickly. And before somebody starts typing...

No, I don't think you need to be the best dancer in the world to teach and I don't think there's a magical number of years you have to train before you're allowed to stand at the front of a room.

But I DO think we need to start taking the responsibility of teaching a LOT more seriously.

Because somewhere along the way particularly within heels, it feels like we've created this weird progression of

Take heels classes → get quite good → make choreography → become a teacher.

And I'm just wondering... Why are we in such a rush?

Being able to dance does not mean you can teach!!!

You can be an incredible dancer and a terrible teacher. Sorry but that's the truth 😭.

Learning choreography quickly doesn't mean you understand movement. Being able to execute a trick doesn't mean you understand how to safely teach somebody else to do it and being able to demonstrate something beautifully doesn't mean you can explain it.

Teaching requires an entirely different set of skills.

Can you break a movement downnnn, explain where somebody's weight should be and why? Can you recognise when their alignment is unsafe and correct it, can you give them a regression if they need it? Can you explain the same thing three different ways when your first explanation doesn't land? Can you look at somebody doing something incorrectly and understand why it's going wrong?

Because “Watch me and copy what I'm doing" isn't teaching!!!

You can't teach foundations you don't understand yourself

This is where I might lose some of you 😂

But if you're going to teach a style, surely you should have a strong understanding of the foundations of that style first? Not just the choreography, the actual mechanics underneath it.

And yes If your feet are flexed, I don't trust you.

Obviously, before somebody deliberately screenshots that sentence out of context, there are movements and styles where a flexed foot is completely intentional and becomes a deliberate choreographic choice. That is not what i am referring to.

BUT do you know when you're making a stylistic choice and when you simply have a technical gap?

The foundations aren't the boring shit you learn before you get to the “good stuff.” The foundations are the reason the good stuff works! Choreography is built ON your foundations....

So I'm going to be quite firm on this one

If you cannot demonstrate strong foundations yourself, I don't think you should be teaching choreography to other people.

And I don't mean you have to be the most technically perfect dancer in the world before you're allowed to teach. Teachers are human, we make mistakes and have weaknesses but we continue training too.

There is a BIG difference between having imperfections/weaknesses and having fundamental gaps in the very thing you're teaching.

Because how can you correct something you can't recognise? How can you explain something you don't understand? And how can you expect your students to develop strong foundations if the person they're learning from can't demonstrate them.

Your students are going to copy what they see, especially beginners. You are their reference point!!! That's why foundations matter so much, you can make the coolest choreography in the world but if the foundations underneath it aren't there, what exactly are you teaching?

Your choreography doesn't immediately need customers

You made a combo? AMAZINGGGG!

Do you know what you can do with it? Hire a studio, invite some friends and workshop it, try different things, change stuff, film it, ask for feedback and do it all over again!

Explore your choreography before immediately deciding that the next logical step is to put it on a booking system and charge 20 people to learn it. Not every creative impulse needs to become a £15 class.

You are allowed to create simply because you want to create and you are allowed to choreograph without being a teacher.

In fact, I think more dancers SHOULD spend time just fucking around with movement without the pressure of needing to package it into something teachable.

Your students will ask questions your own body never needed to

This is why exploring your choreography matters.

You might instinctively know where your weight needs to go because you've been dancing for years but someone else won't, you might have done a movement so many times that you've forgotten which tiny technical details make it work. 

Then somebody asks you “Where is my weight supposed to be here?”

And suddenly you realise...You don't actually know how to explain it😭

That's part of becoming a teacher, you need to understand your movement beyond simply knowing how it feels in your body. Because once you're teaching a room full of people, your choreography is going to meet bodies with different proportions, abilities, mobility, strength, training histories and learning styles.

Your students will ask questions your own body never needed to and you need to be prepared for that.

Do you actually know how to warm up your class?

And I don't mean putting a song on, doing a couple of static stretches, ten star jumps and calling everyone warm 😭

A warm-up shouldn't just be something you do because “that's what happens at the beginning of dance class.”

It should prepare the body for what you're actually about to ask it to do.

Look at the choreography you're about to teach and ask yourself...Are you about to demand significant ankle stability, hip mobility, back/spine movements or core control?

Then what have you actually done to prepare your dancers for those demands? Because getting everyone's heart rate up is only one part of warming up.

There's a difference between making someone hot and sweaty and actually making their body ready for the movement they're about to perform. Being warm isn't the same as being prepared.

And THIS is one of those things that exposes the difference between knowing how to dance and knowing how to teach.

You're responsible for preparing a room full of other people's bodies, that requires thought.

You should have a working understanding of what areas of the body your choreography is going to demand the most from and how you can progressively prepare dancers for those demands.

 “Everyone touch your toes and let's go” isn't enough.

I won't even waste my time talking about classes with NO warm-up... you should know where i stand with that lol😭

Teaching isn't something you do for a bit of fun

Teaching can absolutely BE fun. I f*cking love teaching!!!

But deciding to become responsible for other people's training shouldn't be a casual decision.

People are giving you their Money, time, bodies, trust, and most importantly their safety.

Especially beginners.

A beginner doesn't necessarily know when the information you're giving them is wrong. They don't know what they don't know.

If you're standing at the front of the room and calling yourself the teacher, they're naturally going to assume that you know more than they do. That's a hugeee responsibility.

If you repeatedly teach poor technique, somebody might repeatedly practise poor technique.

If you don't understand how to safely progress a movement, somebody could get hurt.

If you don't understand different bodies and brains, you might make somebody feel like THEY are the problem when actually your teaching method just isn't working for them or they need an adaptation. 

Teaching isn't just “I love dancing and thought this would be fun.”

You're taking responsibility for somebody else's learning. Treat that seriously.

Do you actually know the style you're teaching?

Let me talk specifically about heels...

Do you know where heels dance comes from?

Do you know the dancers and choreographers who pioneered and shaped the style? Have you watched their work and studied it?

Have you actually learned heels technique, rather than simply learning choreography while wearing heels?

Have you trained with multiple teachers or deliberately sought out people who teach differently from each other?

Because I think this is SO important.

If every piece of information you know about heels came from one teacher, you're essentially teaching one person's interpretation of an entire style.

Different teachers will explain things differently. They'll use different terminology. They'll approach walks differently. They'll teach weight placement, lines, transitions, floorwork, musicality and performance differently.

Sometimes they'll even contradict each other.

GOOD.

That's where you start asking questions.

Why does this teacher teach it this way?

Why does another teacher do it differently?

What's foundational and what's stylistic?

Where did this information originally come from?

Eventually, you're not just repeating something somebody once told you.

You actually understand it.

Because otherwise we're playing one giant game of dance telephone.

Teacher learns something, they teach their interpretation then their student starts teaching and they teach their interpretation of the interpretation, suddenly their student starts teaching six months later and eventually nobody knows why the fuck we're doing anything anymore 😭

If you're going to teach a style, you should be a student of that style first and it is your responsibility to find out and learn as much Information about that style as you possibly can

And you should continue that even after you become a teacher.

Why does this feel so common in heels?

This is the part I've been thinking about a lotttt

Why does heels sometimes seem to be treated differently from other dance styles?

Most people understand that you don't take a few ballet classes, buy some ballet shoes and announce you're opening a weekly ballet class.

There's an understanding that ballet has technique, training, history, terminology, foundations.

Yet heels can sometimes get reduced to:

I can dance, I can walk in heels, I made some sexy choreography, I can make people feel confident therefore I can teach heels.

But heels isn't just an aesthetic. Putting choreography in a pair of heels doesn't automatically mean you understand heels technique.

There are mechanics involved in dancing safely and effectively in heels, there are foundations, there is history. There are people who spent YEARS developing and shaping the style before it became something you could find on practically every dance timetable.

If we want heels to be respected as a legitimate dance style...

we need to respect it ourselves.

And before someone says it... what about me?

Fair question. I started teaching heels in 2019 and I'm not going to rewrite history and pretend I knew everything then that I know now because I definitely didn't.

There are things I understand now that I couldn't have explained properly then, there are things I would teach differently today and i had gaps in my knowledge that I didn't even realise were gaps yet.

But there's also some important context.

Before I ever put a pair of heels on, I'd already had 17 years of dance training across MANY styles.

I understood dance terminology, timing, musicality, body awareness, weight transfer, choreography. I was assisting my dance teachers with the younger classes from the age of 13 and I started teaching other styles i was more experienced in first before ever teaching heels.

Once i found an interest in learning heels dance i RESEARCHEDDD everything. I studied the pioneers, i watched interviews and videos and anything i could get my hands on because i was genuinely hungry for the knowledge NOT because i wanted to teach it but because i wanted to understand it as a dancer first and foremost.

The heels scene in the UK looked VERY different then, heels was only just beginning to establish itself properly here. A lot of the classes available were essentially commercial choreography... in heels.

The heels-specific technical training that we now see taught much more intentionally wasn't nearly as accessible or established in the classes around me.

Does that mean I was completely ready? No 😂

And that's partly WHY I feel so strongly about this conversation now.

I've spent the years since continuing to train, teach, travel, learn from different people, question information I'd previously been given, change the way I teach things and realise just how much I didn't know that I didn't know.

That's growth.

But babe... it's 2026

This is where my sympathy starts running slightly thinner 😂

Because look at how much has changed, heels is EVERYWHERE now.

We have Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, online classes and training platforms, workshops, intensives, conventions, teachers travelling internationally and in most major cities you can find some form of heels training in person.

You can sit in your bedroom and access information from dancers on the other side of the world that a lot of us would have had to physically travel to learn from when I started.

Now obviously access still isn't equal.. not everybody lives in a major city, not everybody can afford endless classes, conventions or international travel. I'm not pretending otherwise.

But there has never been more heels information available than there is now.

And I'm sorry but...

If you've got enough access to Instagram to advertise your heels class, you've probably got enough access to Instagram to research heels first.

The standard SHOULD move forward as the information moves forward, the dancers coming after us should know more than we did. That's the whole point of passing knowledge down.

DO YOU WANT TO TEACH... OR DO YOU JUST WANT TO BE THE TEACHER?

There's a difference between loving teaching and loving the feeling of being the teacher.

Teaching naturally comes with a certain amount of validation. You're at the front of the room. Everyone's learning your choreography. People are filming you, tagging you, telling you they loved your class. You get to call yourself a teacher and choreographer.

And..That can feed your ego.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying being recognised for your work. There's nothing wrong with being proud when your class sells out or seeing a room full of people doing something YOU created.

But your ego cannot be the reason the class exists.

Your students are not there to make you feel important. They're paying you to learn.

A good teacher isn't spending the class trying to prove how good THEY are. They're focused on making the people in front of them better and if your favourite part of teaching is having a room full of people watching you dance...

maybe what you actually want is an audience. 😭 If that's the case, being a performer is literally an option.

Becoming a teacher isn't the final level of being a dancer

I think we've accidentally created this idea that the dance progression looks like:

Beginner → Intermediate → Advanced → Teacher

It doesn't.

Teaching isn't the final Pokémon evolution of being a dancer lol😭

You can be an incredible, highly trained experienced dancer and never teach a class in your life.

You can choreograph without teaching, you can create without teaching, you can perform without teaching, you can hire a studio with your friends and spend three hours experimenting with movement without turning it into a business.

You don't need students to validate the fact that you're becoming a good dancer and becoming a teacher certainly doesn't mean you've completed your own training.

If anything, I think standing at the front of the room should make you MORE aware of how much responsibility you have to continue learning.

Take classes, study, ask questions, train with people who know more than you, train with people who move differently from you, let yourself be corrected, change your mind when you learn better information.

Becoming a teacher shouldn't be the moment you stop being a student.

So... when ARE you ready to teach?

I don't have a magic number for you sorry

I can't tell you that after five years, 300 classes and exactly 17 pirouettes you're officially qualified 😂

That's not how this works and nobody knows everything before they begin teaching, you will become a better teacher BY teaching.

You'll encounter bodies you've never taught before, get questions you've never considered and you will make mistakes but that's how we learn and change.

That's normal.

But there is a huge difference between:

“I have a strong foundation and I'm ready to start developing my skills as a teacher.”

and

“I've been taking this style for a while, people tell me I'm good, so I might as well start a class.”

Before you ask people to pay you for your knowledge, maybe ask yourself:

Do I actually understand the foundations I'm teaching?

Can I explain movement rather than just demonstrate it?

Do I understand how to physically prepare my students for the choreography I'm about to teach?

Can I recognise when a movement needs to be adapted, regressed or removed?

Have I explored my choreography enough to teach it confidently?

Have I studied this style beyond the classes immediately available to me?

Have I learned from multiple people?

Do I know something about the history and the people behind what I'm teaching?

Have I helped assist other classes or taught my friends to gain experience?

And perhaps most importantly:

Am I becoming a teacher because I genuinely have something I'm ready to teach...

or because becoming a teacher feels like the next thing I'm supposed to do?

There is NO rush.

Keep dancing and training, hire the studio to make choreo and workshop it with friends. Experiment as much as you can, let yourself be shit at things, develop your own style and voice. 

And when you eventually decide to take responsibility for somebody else's training, give that responsibility the weight it deserves.

Because teaching isn't just getting to stand at the front of the room.

It's being trusted with everybody standing behind you.