Skills you learn from Dance (Year 11)

Dance builds a distinctive set of skills - physical control and technique, choreographing and composing, performance and audience awareness, collaboration, analytical writing, and reflecting and refining. This lesson plan will help you to show Year 11 students the skills they've built and which they want to keep developing post-16.

This lesson is designed to be delivered in 30 minutes as a teacher-led classroom activity.

This activity supports the following frameworks:

  • Gatsby Benchmark 4

This activity is suitable for Year 11 and features careers linked to the following subjects:

  • Dance

This is one of three lesson plans designed for Year 11 Dance teachers:

These lesson plans will help you show students how Dance connects to their future careers.

We recommend using this lesson plan at the end of the autumn term. By this point Year 11 students have over a year of GCSE Dance behind them and are beginning to weigh post-16 options. Recognising the skills they've built - and thinking about which they want to keep developing - helps them choose a post-16 route (A-Levels, T-Levels, an apprenticeship, a vocational dance school audition, or a foundation/pre-vocational year) that compounds those skills rather than starting from scratch.

Learning objectives

  • Students will name specific skills they've built through GCSE Dance, with examples.
  • Students will identify which of those skills they want to keep developing.
  • Students will consider how that shapes their post-16 choices.

Before the lesson

  • You will need a computer connected to the internet and a classroom screen.
  • Open the What can you do with Dance? page and have it ready on the screen.
  • Review the Skills that Dance builds section and think of recent teaching examples for each one.

During the lesson

1. What have we studied over GCSE? (5 mins)

  • Ask students to call out projects, performances, sequences, or techniques they've covered in GCSE Dance.
  • Write the suggestions on the board and highlight any patterns.

2. Skills that Dance builds (15 mins)

  • Bring up the What can you do with Dance? page on the classroom screen.
  • Review the contents of the page with students so that they understand what it covers.
  • Scroll to the Skills that Dance builds section and work through each skill in turn.
    • Ask students which project, performance, or technique from the board involved that skill.
    • Share your own teaching examples if students are stuck.

3. Looking forward (10 mins)

  • Ask students to think about which of these skills matter most for the post-16 route they're considering.
    • Which of these skills are central to the careers you're interested in?
    • Which would you like to build further at A-Level, T-Level, vocational dance school, a foundation/pre-vocational year, or in training?
    • Are there skills on this list you've enjoyed using more than you expected?
  • Go round the class, asking each student to name one skill they want to keep developing and how they could do it.
  • Close by reminding students that recognising the skills they've already built helps them choose post-16 options that compound them - and helps them talk about themselves clearly in interviews, auditions, and applications.

After the lesson

  • Share the What can you do with Dance? page with students and their parents/carers:
    • www.coffeewith.xyz/subjects/what-can-you-do-with-dance
  • Encourage parents/carers to explore the page with their child and to discuss the contents.
  • Use the School Tools / Activities feature to record the lesson activity:
    • Activity name: Year 11 - Skills you learn from Dance
    • Activity type: Linking curriculum learning to careers
  • Read the follow-on lesson plan: