SSD to Plus Teaching Plan

Kurt Gollhardt has been doing a lot of SSD work recently with clubs in the San Francisco Bay area. His success in recruiting new dancers with the SSD program naturally resulted in some of those new dancers wanting to tackle Plus. In his own words, here is Kurt's story of what he did, how it worked out, and links to some supporting materials with even more details:

I used this mini-blast format successfully in April 2023 and I've started a new class (with 24 students) now; week 1 went very well.

A key part of this 4-session biweekly 3-hour weekend afternoon class format is having 3-4 class-level review/practice tips on the regular club nights in between (and at least 2 weeks after the last class).

The material is tight, but doable. 3.5 hours or even 4 would make it more relaxed, and allow for more dance time at the end, but I've found that on average (with our current demographic) students, and especially angels, don't have the patience and/or stamina for more than 3 hours. (We tried various other lengths earlier.)

And I settled on 4 sessions rather than 5, because each one increases the chance that more students will miss one or more sessions, and there isn't really any chance for them to catch up. (If they're strong learners, and study online and make the review sessions, they can manage; but average students would have trouble.)

To make it work, I depend heavily on doing some tips with mini-squares to get a quick, tight focus on related groups of 4-person calls. Then I sprinkle applications of those in full squares along with 8-person call teaching in the next tip.

I used to sometimes do these mini-blasts for zero-to-SSD as well (and for a similar pre-SSD 50-call list), but found that it doesn't really suit the average casual dancer that SSD targets. But once you've got a group moving on to Plus that has a good grasp of the basic concepts and is self-selected to want to return to learning mode, it works better, and keeps the club from having to dedicate significant portions of club nights to teaching (or find the resources to support a second weeknight, with angels, for the class).

Kurt