Most of our practice sessions start with a 15 minutes of community time then followed by a warmup and 20-minute group exercise. The goal of the exercise is to get the creative juices flowing and to help people with their free practice time. We realize a whole class cant be condensed into 20 min, but it could be enough to teach a fun game, basic step, drill, or encourage people to ask about a more advanced topic later. Here are some considerations for leading a successful exercise:

Timing

1. Exercises should start at 11:25 am
2. Exercises MUST end at 11:50 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. NOTE: We do have a beginner coach available and so people who have never danced ever can be referred to them so that exercise leaders dont have to reinvent the wheel in 20 minutes.

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 incorporate.
• 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 unless talking is goal. 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 to suit the goal of the exercise instead of defaulting to a particular rotation.
   1. Example: Small 4-person groups and assign specific roles to each person in a group to help them talk about a topic more
4. Add constraints to make exploration easier. Avoid vague language that could lead to confusion.