Dance buddies: A little history, a lot of dance and some unusual mentoring

When the students at Amazing Grace Christian School in Renton are asked to face the music, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re being called on the carpet, unless, of course, you mean cutting a rug. Dance is an integral part of the K-8 school, thanks to a UW graduate student who’s been teaching there.

Michelle Zimmerman first introduced dance into the school’s curriculum when she was only 16 and a volunteer there.  Intending to become a teacher, she was participating in a “Careers in Education” program that included volunteering in a classroom. As part of her work, she applied for a grant in American music history, and decided on a project on the World War II era. Her plan was to integrate American history, music, social studies and physical education, with the latter coming in the form of swing dancing. She didn’t get the grant, but she introduced dancing anyway, integrating it with the history of the time.

That was 11 years ago, and Amazing Grace students have been dancing ever since. On Feb. 4, a group of sixth, seventh and eighth graders got to visit a UW dance classroom, where they showed off their moves and learned some new ones from the college students in Juliet McMains’ ballroom class.

Why teach grade schoolers dance? Zimmerman said she first thought of it as something to integrate into the curriculum, as in the original project she envisioned in her grant proposal. Besides including it in the study of the World War II era, she’s integrated it with science — talking about the physics of spinning and the sound waves of music and the way the brain sends messages to the body to move, among other things. Meanwhile, as she moved through her undergraduate years, she took dance class with McMains to help her better teach the younger kids.

But for Zimmerman, the real magic of dance in the schools was unlocked when she decided to have kids become dance mentors to each other. She started out with a group of second graders — teaching them dance moves and then having them teach the same moves to preschoolers and kindergartners.

“The thing I found interesting is, when the second graders started working with kids even younger, they started building relational bonds,” Zimmerman said. “There was an interesting dynamic in that they were excited and proud to see someone else doing something they had taught them. That seemed to increase motivation for them to keep on excelling in it.”

By that time Zimmerman had earned her psychology degree and had moved on to graduate school in the College of Education. Before long, her dancing grade schoolers became not just students, but also study subjects. Zimmerman learned there were lots of positive effects from mentoring, but was surprised when third graders began doing something she’d read about in research journals.

“When I read teacher research literature, what adult teachers do is say, ‘How can I improve my instructional strategies? What can I do to help students learn in a different way?’ I noticed third graders doing the same, asking ‘What can I do to help my buddy learn this when things aren’t working right? When someone doesn’t want to dance at this moment or they’re having a particularly hard time with this step, how can I adjust my teaching?’ And that seemed pretty advanced to me for a third grader.”

Not that the dance pairings went smoothly from the first. There was the usual, “I’m not touching her hand. She’s a girl” and “Eww, boys. I’ll get cooties.”

But Zimmerman emphasized to the students that they weren’t pairing off in any significant way.  They weren’t dating. Rather, they were “friends dancing together.” She made sure the kids changed partners often as they danced, and she called the mentors and mentees “dance buddies.”

Interestingly, Zimmerman said, it was the boys who were particularly enthusiastic about the project. They were the first to raise their hands to talk about their experiences, and they wrote excitedly about it in their journals. They sometimes reported that their buddies thought of them as superheroes.

“This led me into reading about male dominance hierarchy and rough and tumble play,” Zimmerman said. “I saw that the boys felt higher on a dominance hierarchy but not in the way of ‘I’m going to punch you out.’ More like ‘I’ve been around the block and I know a thing or two about this, so come here and I’ll show you how to be a man.’ I started to see nurturing behavior develop out of this.”

She added that boys who were not doing well in academics were often quite enthusiastic about dance.

Today, Zimmerman has completed coursework and exams for a doctorate in educational psychology, and is working on a dissertation on cross-age mentoring. The sixth grade students she brought with her to the University have been dancing since they were in preschool and involved in mentoring since third grade, which explains how, after witnessing McMains giving her college students a lesson on the foxtrot, they got up and unhesitatingly demonstrated a dance they had learned. After that, dance buddies from Amazing Grace paired up with two college students each to learn three dance moves the UW students demonstrated  — the swing step, sweetheart promenade and promenade pivot.

Jenna Tollefson, one of McMains’ students, said the experience was amusing because “the students from Amazing Grace were intimidated that we were college students and we were intimidated because they have been doing ballroom for years and we have just passed the one month mark.”

But there was plenty of laughter in the room as college and middle school students started working together.

“This was the first time I ever tried to teach someone how to dance so it was a lot of trial and error,” said Eric Shellan, another of McMains’ students. “Now I can definitely empathize with our professor — both in her frustration and pride. It was so much fun to watch the middle schoolers perform on their own after we had taught them!”

Zimmerman noticed the UW students’ enthusiasm. “I saw them pointing out the buddy they worked with at the end and saying things like ‘that’s my kid!’ and ‘Woo! Nailed it!’ My students do that all the time with their little buddies (they even call them ‘my kid’). I was a little surprised to see those same things come from college students.”

McMains said she expected that her students would get positive results from the session. “They were being asked to be the expert, and that’s a great confidence booster,” she said.

As for the Amazing Grace students, they talked about the experience all the way home, and several voluntarily wrote thank you notes to their UW mentors.

Which, in Zimmerman’s view, simply confirms the power of mentoring. “There is a huge relational component to the cross age mentoring that seems to add to the motivation to achieve, and to repeat the experience.”

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