At Elite Dance Academy, one of our core values is Compassion: We nurture and care for every student.
I’ve been thinking about that word a little differently lately.
Compassion can sound like being kind, being understanding, or helping someone feel better when something is hard. And yes, it is all of those things. But after more than 20 years of leading Elite, and many more years of being a dancer myself, I think compassion in teaching goes much deeper.
Compassion isn’t about removing the challenge. It’s understanding what someone needs to successfully move through it.
I see examples of this every week in our teachers’ reports.
One that keeps showing up is the way our teachers work with our class assistants. Honestly, having class assistants isn’t necessarily the easiest route. Our teachers are really teaching two different groups at once. They are teaching their students while also teaching these young leaders how to assist, communicate, encourage, and eventually even instruct.
But that’s exactly why I think it is so valuable.
Our younger dancers have someone in the room who is closer to their age. Someone they can relate to and look up to. And our class assistants aren’t just standing at the front demonstrating. Our teachers are intentionally developing them, too. They are teaching them how to notice what a younger dancer needs and how to help that child succeed.
There is compassion for everyone in that room. We’re meeting our younger dancers where they are while also developing our older dancers into thoughtful, emotionally intelligent leaders.
Another example came from one of our beginner teen classes.
Improvisation can be intimidating at any age, but I think it gets even harder as kids get older. They get in their heads. They become more aware of who might be watching them. They worry about whether they’re doing it “right.”
It would be very easy for a teacher to turn on the music and simply say, “Okay, improv!”
Instead, our teacher partnered the dancers. Their job wasn’t just to improvise. They also had to encourage their partner while they were doing it.
I LOVE this.
Now they weren’t standing alone feeling like everyone was watching them. They were taking the risk together. They were cheering each other on and bonding over the fact that what they were doing felt a little scary.
That’s compassion.
We didn’t eliminate the scary thing. We recognized why it might feel scary and created an environment where they felt safer trying it.
And sometimes compassion is even simpler than that.
A dancer is struggling with an exercise or a combination. Instead of just telling them to keep trying, our teachers are stopping and actually talking about it.
What’s feeling hard? What’s frustrating? What do you need?
The teacher can step in, offer support, and have a conversation while still allowing that dancer to have autonomy in their movement and figure things out for themselves.
That is very different from the dance world I grew up in.
There was a lot of tough love. Figure it out. Push through. Keep going.
And there are things about that training that I absolutely value. Resilience, discipline, perseverance and doing hard things matter.
But we know more now.
We know we can develop those same qualities while also paying attention to the emotional experience of the child standing in front of us.
As a More Than Just Great Dancing affiliated studio, and through my own involvement as a leader within MTJGD for more than a decade, we continue to challenge ourselves to focus on the whole child, not just the execution of perfected movement.
That doesn’t mean lowering expectations.
It means being smarter about how we help kids rise to them.
What does THIS child need to take the next step?
Maybe it’s an older dancer beside them.
Maybe it’s a peer cheering them on.
Maybe it’s a teacher who notices they’re struggling and stops long enough to have a conversation.
To me, that’s compassion at Elite.
It isn’t rescuing kids from hard things. It’s seeing them, understanding them, and giving them the support and tools to move through hard things.
Because we’re not just teaching kids how to dance.
We’re helping them become confident, happy, and strong.
And compassion is one of the ways we get them there.
Lisa Pevateaux
Owner & Visionary, Elite Dance Academy