education

Our Approach to Working in Education Settings

We’ve always loved working in schools to deliver dance workshops as we know this is a great way to reach more children and young people, and potentially open more doors to the world of dance.

Over the past few years we’ve developed a range of new projects and programmes for Early Years settings and schools to support the transition to the new Curriculum for Wales. Our primary aim has been to develop teachers’ confidence to use dance and movement as a subject, as a way to explore the curriculum and as a way to manage wellbeing and transitions in class, through Welsh or English.

“We have loved it - working with YOUR pupils in YOUR environment is a much better way to receive training….I am amazed by what they (the pupils) achieved”
— PE Teacher, Welshpool High School. Impelo Cinetig project 2022

We know from our conversations that many teachers just don’t know where to begin, we hear things like “I’m not a dancer - I can’t stand in front of my class and show them what to do!”  Knowing that teachers are used to facilitating all kinds of other activities, we've been determined to reassure and upskill educators that they really can do it!

Through a mixture of practitioner-led and teacher training sessions, we’ve brought dance and movement into education settings in a variety of ways:

 
 

  • Practitioner-led dance classes (via zoom & Youtube during Covid restrictions)

  • Practitioner-led wellbeing sessions for teachers (via zoom & Youtube during Covid restrictions)

  • In-school practitioner-led curriculum exploration sessions

  • Practitioner-led after school and holiday club sessions

  • Online teacher training sessions

  • Organised teacher training days

  • In-school teacher training programmes

  • A new online platform, Cinetig, for educators with bilingual resources that include videos for team-teaching with, videos to support planning, videos to boost teachers’ own physical confidence, lesson plans and word banks

 
 

Our development in this area will continue to build on the good practice we’ve been developing, co-designing programmes with teachers to suit their own settings and responding to the needs in each school - we like to see where we can nurture and where we can challenge!

Our work has received attention locally where we have met with the Wellbeing Team in Powys County Council and the Expressive Arts Leads of Powys. We’ve also shared our work on a national level, presenting to the Expressive Arts Leads team in Wales, and delivering teacher training packages for other county councils.

To discuss Impelo coming into your school, to sign up to our schools newsletter or to access our digital platform for educators in Powys please get in touch with Jemma!