Post Class Surveys

I just finished teaching a month of classes for NSDF.  They collect survey responses at the end of each class, which I think is a great idea.  That is something that I always planned to do when I was running Music City Motion (but I never actually did it) and I think is a good idea for every event, with the following caveat: make sure it’s a useful survey.

The results from the class I taught were mixed, most people had good reactions to the class, a few had stellar reactions and a few were disappointed to varying degrees.  That didn’t bother me much (though my partner was quite upset that we didn’t get rave reviews from everyone).  What bothered me, is that because of the way the survey was formatted, I can’t use the results to learn or improve anything.  

All I know from the survey is that a certain percent of the students were “very satisfied” with the class, yet a few of those “very satisfied” students thought our teaching was confusing and unorganized (which I will admit, there were times when I was confusing and unorganized). We don’t even know if it was me, or my partner that was more confusing to the students (I’m guessing it was me, simply because I talked much more than she did).

If you are going to survey, which I recommend you do, survey well and prepare your survey carefully (beyond making sure that spelling and grammar are proper).  There are a few things you need to consider as you build the survey.

1. Goals for the Survey - What do you want to accomplish?  What do you hope to get from the survey results?  Do you want to know what you should change?  Do you just want an ego stroke?  Before you make your survey you need to know how you plan to use the survey, and ask your questions from that vantage point.  The more you want to get out of the survey, the more complex and deliberate your questioning needs to be.
2. Audience - How many people will take the survey?  This is important because if you can’t use the same survey with a small group as with a large group.  Small groups are more difficult to evaluate because one or two extreme opinions (positive or negative) will skew results.

   With a small group you have to have much more open ended questions (especially if you don’t want to give them a survey that is pages long) in order to get useful information.  With a larger group you can get away with fewer open questions as long as you ask specific questions that can give you what you’ve decided you want to know.

3. Precise Questions - Don’t ask a bunch of generic questions unless you want generic answers.  ”Please rate your instructors” isn’t going to tell you much unless you follow up with questions about specific areas of performance.  You could easily wind up with very high, or very low ratings on very good, or very bad instructors because one of two things dominated the opinions of the students.  Unless you break down the rating, you can’t know why the instructors got that rating, and the instructors don’t learn anything useful about how their teaching was perceived.
4. No Double Questions - Don’t lump questions together if each question could have a separate answer. “I thought the instructors were well organized and easy to understand” is a bad question because there are two parts: well organized, and easy to understand.  Each of those, while related, are different and could easily have different answers.  When you write out your survey, look for these “and” clauses.  If you’ve asked two questions either make it two questions or figure out which one you actually want to know and leave the other out.
5. Test - For my real job, I do lots of testing, split testing, multi-variate testing, etc.  I have learned the value of testing everything I do that provides me feedback, so that the feedback I get is the most useful.  That old measure twice cut once adage.

   After you’ve built your survey, give it to a sample group (I’d recommend that if you are going to survey at the end of something, midway through ask for some volunteers) and see if the responses you get are useable (you may also learn something you can improve upon before your event/class/etc is over).  If your results aren’t that helpful you’ll be able to see pretty easily which questions are at fault.  Than change them, and if you have time test again.

6. Dissect the Results - Don’t just tabulate results and report the % responses to each question.  Drop all the raw data into excel and use filters to see how answers of one question impacted the answers of another, and what the open responses you received to which kinds of satisfaction ratings etc.  That is where the real value is found.
7. Don’t Wait for Perfection - If you don’t have time to do all the above, go ahead and survey.  But promise yourself to evaluate and modify your survey with the results before you conduct your next survey.  It is often better to survey imperfectly than to not survey at all, just remember to take your results with a grain (or whole shaker) of salt.

There are many FREE resources on the web to help you build your survey.  If you just search you could probably even build your survey by just copying and rewording some of the sample questions you’ll find out there.

If you survey well, your results will be far beyond the ego stroke that most surveys provide.  You’ll learn what to change and how to change.  You’ll learn why something (or someone) is satisfactory to some and unsatisfactory to others.  And that is when a survey because useful.

The growing homogeneity of lindy hop

Because of shifting priorities and the growing complexity of my life I haven’t studied lindy hop outside of my own laboratory much in the past few years. As a result my exposure to the current trends in Lindy Hop is second hand and I have an interesting perspective as I judge competitions, teach classes, and make the travels I do get to take.

I started to dance in the height of the “Savoy” vs “Hollywood” vs “Wiggle-hop” days. A well travelled dancers could quickly and easily pick out regional styles, the influence of individual instructors, and there was some pride in dancing so that people new you were from Chicago, or San Francisco, or DC, etc.

As I watch You Tube, as I watch dancers throughout the southeast, as I watch various instructors I am disappointed by what I see as a growing homogeneity. And the ultimate irony is that the current trend was initially created by a few exciting dancers seeking out the rawness that exists in plenty in the archives of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers.

Events like ULHS are also accomplices. Created to counter the sterilization of ALHC it has also become a bastion of “dance like us”. Don’t misunderstand me, the dancing at ULHS is fantastic and entertaining, it’s just looking more and more the same with fewer and fewer competitors taking the risk of dancing their “own” way (Todd Yannacone and Peter Strom come to mind quickly as exceptions, as do Mike Faltesek and Sky Humphries – but they helped to create the “raw” trend). The big exception I see is in the Solo Charleston contests, where individualism is often the deciding factor.

I don’t like the homogeneity, I want the variety back. I’m tired of dancing with followers who can’t/won’t follow what I lead because it’s so far removed from their paradigm, even generally recognized exceptional followers. I want to look forward to an event because I love the way they dance in such city. I miss the focus placed on leading and following in classes, skills that allowed you to dance with anyone regardless of how they liked to dance. I miss watching the diversity on the dance floor, not just of levels of experience and talent, but of musicality, interpretation, and even just basic swingouts.

I want people to start trying to dance they way “they” dance again and stop the driving pursuit to dance just like “he” or “she” dances. I want judges to again qualify good dancing apart from “cool” dancing and I want to see a return to instruction about how to do what you want, rather than doing what is cool.

Oh, the Addiction

Thanks to Reuel leaving for a month, I had the pleasure of teaching a handful of private lessons in his stay. One of the students (I’ll call her Sarah) is new to dancing completely.

Sarah is one of the reasons I love teaching. I’m not usually a big proponent of brand new swing dancers learning in a private setting for a variety of reasons, but since Nashville doesn’t really have any beginner classes available right now I didn’t refer her to a class to start with.

She showed up with all the typical trepidations of a newbie coupled with an utter lack of confidence in her own ability to keep a beat or move her body with any grace.  She claimed to be completely unable to find or keep a rhythm, but she always wanted to learn to dance, and she was finally going to do that.

In contrast to all her worries, she turned out to be a very quick study. She asked smart questions and thought through the basics with keen sophistication I don’t typically see in beginners (or even many more intermediate dancers).

After the 1st lesson I convinced her to go dancing that night with the promise that I would be there and would dance with her and answer any questions she had.  By the time I showed up at the dance (late because I’d been listening to Vanderbilt become bowl eligible for only the 2nd time in my lifetime) Sarah was drenched in sweat and barely had time to dance with me.

We had a follow up lesson a few days later and she showed up all aglow with excitement, jubilation, anticipation, all those feelings that can make one’s eyes twinkle. She was addicted, she loved it, and was desperate to learn more.

Oh if everyone would embrace being a beginner with such abandon.

Review: Michael Gamble

I have had the absolute pleasure of watching Michael develop as both a Lindy Hopper and an instructor over the past few years. Sugar Foot Stomp was the first weekend I’ve taken a class from just him (solo Charleston/Jazz) and it was a wonderful class.

Michael has a way of explaining things that really makes sense to me, and seemed to make sense to the rest of the class. Solo dancing in freestyle leaves me feeling very awkward, regardless of whether it is Jazz or Charleston. My so experience consists of exactly: the Shim Sham, Big Apple, the Madison, and various Steven Mitchell routines over 6 years. The result is that while I may know a ton of great stuff, I’ve been pressed beyond my skill level by Steven, and barely learned the fundamentals of solo movement from the Shim Sham etc.

My biggest complaint about my awkwardness is that I either get stuck doing the same thing over and over and can’t escape, or can’t figure out how to get from where I am into what I know can be done. Michael’s class took me some very large steps in that direction.

To relive the class in this post would make it seem too simplistic. But simplistic is why this class worked; the cookie were put on the bottom shelf for the students to eat from, BUT the cookies weren’t spoon fed. He paced the class and the topics covered were perfect for learning at your own pace, which is exactly why his class was so successful. He left room for me to ask questions of my own dancing and rather than providing the answers he really did give me the tools to go out and and find the answer I needed. I am so glad I took his class. For me, even as great as Chad and Midori were, Michael’s solo class was worth the trip to Asheville by itself.

Tags: Solo, Charleston, Jazz, Michael Gamble, Sugar Foot Stomp, Shim Sham, Big Apple, the Madison, Steven Mitchell, dance routine

Review: Midori & Chad at Sugar Foot Stomp

Sugar Foot Stomp (which I’ll review later this week) was a weekend of workshops on old school dancing by Midori & Chad. And by old school I’m not joking, the focus of the weekend was Peabody on Saturday and 20’s Charleston (partnered) on Sunday.

In brief, I LOVED Chad and Midori. The just plain did it for me, and I’m not 100% certain that I know what all it was. In fact, thinking over the classes I took (which were the best classes I’ve taken in a long while) I can’t think of one thing I would have done differently, I can’t remember anything I wish they hadn’t done, and I can remember all kinds of things I took note of to make sure that I insert into my own teaching. And their little baby is pretty cute to, all thin blond baby hair sticking up everywhere. Apparently he refused to leave the dance Saturday night until about 1. His parents had a tough time dragging him from that party.

Unfortunately I missed all but the review class for the Peabody on Saturday, but I really wish I hadn’t missed it. I did catch everything they did in the Charleston though, and I’m so glad I did. Nothing that they did was particularly difficult, but most of it (I’d say 75%) was “new” to me, in that I hadn’t ever seen it in a class or happened to work it out on my own.

There are some tangibles I do remember from the weekend that I can mention. With the classes the pacing seemed near perfect. Even as an advanced dancer I didn’t find myself bored; their introduction, breakdown, buildup, and put together kept the class flowing nicely, and enabled the lesser experienced dancers to keep up for the most part. Part of the pacing (and my lack of boredom) could be due to their energy. Again, they seemed to be perfect. They had just enough energy to keep me engaged and intense enough to work on the material, but not so much that they wore me out or annoyed me.

The pacing was quite good and the material was excellent. I thought they planned the class flow very well and really seemed to stick to their plan. That they are professionals and long time pro’s at that really shown through their class execution.

They were also fun, and seemed like they are very fun people to be around; disarmingly humorous and no small amount of charm. I didn’t pick up a hint of arrogance from either, I witnessed them mingling and not just hobnobbing, they both sought out struggling individuals to help during practice it yourself times in the classes, and they never displayed any disappointment or annoyance at the class levels, even when very rudimentary questions were asked of them.

If they make their way down south again, I probably won’t hesitate to jump at the chance to learn from them again. Thank you Michael and Jaya for bringing them in! Heck, I might even just hire them myself some day.

Tags: Chadand Midori, Fasca, Sugar Foot Stomp, Peabody, 20s Charleston, Swing Dancing