Most of our practice sessions start with a warmup followed by a 15- to 20-minute group exercise. Here are some considerations for leading a successful exercise.

Timing

1. Exercises should start at 11:10 am
2. Exercises should end at 11:30 am

Exercise Creation

Process

For exercises led by a Lindy Hopcats community member (as opposed to a working instructor), we request that the point person planning the exercise either use an exercise they’ve seen instructors run before or collaborate with additional team members. We expect that the collaborative process will help create an exercise with the most benefit for a wide range of people by including different perspectives. The process of working through the exercise with one or more collaborators will help your dancing too!

Make sure to credit wherever the exercise came from. For example, “This exercise was inspired by a Sharon Davis class.” or “This is an exercise that Jon Tigert and Jenna Applegarth use.”

Audience

Because we want to welcome dancers at all levels of experience, we want our exercises to be interesting and useful for that broad audience.

If we want to run an exercise with prerequisites, we would give that context at the start and let people choose to participate in the exercise or do another activity.

Here are some approaches we’ve used in preparing all-levels exercises.

• We may start working on a fundamental skill first, and then later in the exercise add optional elements for people to try and think about.
• In some exercises (like Secret Lindy Agent and Adaptable lead and creative follow), we ask dancers to choose something to change in their dancing. We provide some example ideas for anyone who wants help coming up with something, but many of the more experienced dancers will come up with their own ideas.
• There are many fundamental skills that everyone can benefit from working on. 🙂

Key Elements

1. Minimize talking to maximize time doing the exercise. Keep main ideas to 1-3 key points.
2. Gamification that encourages teamwork can help get people really engaged.
   1. Examples: Lindy Tag , Secret Lindy Agent
3. Rotations should have a purpose. We want to think about how many people per group makes sense instead of defaulting to a particular rotation.
   1. Example: Small 4-person groups and assign specific roles to each person in a group
4. Add constraints to make exploration easier. Avoid vague language that could lead to confusion.