Student-centered Strategies for Teaching Modern Dance in Secondary Physical Education

Effective physical education (PE) programming incorporates the psychomotor, cognitive and affective domains as expressed by the SHAPE America National Standards. When integrated appropriately into PE, dance can address all three domains of learning. Dance includes learning steps that can be used across the lifespan at events such as parties and wedding receptions (i.e., psychomotor), critical thinking when creating or analyzing a dance routine (i.e., cognitive), and self-expression when emoting through the performance and communicating with fellow dancers (i.e., affective; Bajek, Richards, & Ressler, in press). The purpose of this article was to focus on a student-centered approach to teaching modern dance in secondary PE. Dance has the potential to make an important contribution to PE as a physical activity in which the psychomotor, cognitive and affective domains can be taught and assessed simultaneously. Specifically, modern dance presents the opportunity for students to synthesize content from a variety of other subject areas.