Professional Development for Arts Organizations and Schools
Customized Training and Group Access to DEL Courses
DEL works with schools, school systems, and arts organizations in New York City and across the country to provide customized professional development and group access to DEL courses.
We provide professional development for:
- Public schools and school districts looking for dance education programming aligned with National Core Arts Standards
- Charter and independent schools seeking dance teacher training and professional development
- Early childhood centers and nursery schools seeking specialized training in developmentally appropriate approaches to embodied learning through dance and play
- Dance companies and arts organizations looking to build or strengthen dance education programming
Custom-Designed Professional Development
DEL builds workshops around your organization’s specific needs, whether you are looking to develop new student engagement strategies, strengthen inclusive practices through culturally responsive pedagogy, explore tailored approaches for working with students with disabilities, or learn how to plan and facilitate a DEL Movement Sentence Choir. Whatever your goals, our team can:
- Design live virtual trainings or in-person workshops, scaled to meet your budget and location
- Ensure curriculum is aligned to the National Core Arts Standards, applicable across public and private school settings
Discounted Group Access to DEL Courses
Bring DEL professional learning to your team with discounted group pricing for our asynchronous courses. Choose from courses covering a wide range of topics, from dance for students with disabilities to functional anatomy to curriculum design. Courses are available for educators working with students from Pre-K to Grade 12. Ask us about:
- Discounted course access for groups of three or more educators from the same organization
- Flexible course options that allow educators to select courses based on their individual interests and teaching environments, or enroll together in the same course
Why Organizations Choose DEL
For 30 years, the Dance Education Laboratory (DEL) has been a leader in dance education, helping educators bring meaningful, student-centered dance experiences into classrooms and communities. DEL trains teachers to create learning environments where students have an active voice, explore ideas through their bodies, and develop their own dances through collaboration, choice, and creative problem-solving.
Student-Centered Learning:
DEL’s approach centers student dance-making as a way of learning. We train educators to move beyond teacher-directed instruction and create experiences in which students are not simply learning about dance, but making, exploring, and thinking through dance.
Practical Tools for Teaching:
DEL provides practical, adaptable tools that educators can use to build individual lessons as well as longer thematic units across a range of ages, settings, and levels of experience.
Field and Standards Expertise:
DEL’s faculty were instrumental in the development of the NYC Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in Dance, and we have extensive experience training educators to align dance instruction with the National Core Arts Standards
Frequently Asked Questions
For Custom-Designed Professional Development: Services are custom-designed based on your organization’s needs, but you can expect a minimum cost of $2,500 to bring a DEL training to your teaching staff.
For Discounted Group Access to DEL Courses: Discounted group rates for our asynchronous courses start at $171 each for three or more participating teachers, but organizations can save more per individual enrollment with larger group sizes.
3+ Teachers: 10% off
5+ Teachers: 15% off
10+ Teachers: 20% off
The NYC Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in Dance moves beyond National Core Arts Standards, meaning that our classroom strategies are designed to exceed national expectations for dance education. We are happy to review your school or organization’s stated requirements before we engage in any professional development design to ensure we’re meeting your state and individual standards, too.
DEL has a small but mighty team, engaged in curriculum design, trainings, conferences, intensives, and more year-round. We find that it typically takes at least 1-2 months to move from initial inquiry to professional development training. Group course access can be arranged in as little as 2 weeks from your initial request and payment.
DEL facilitators are experienced in translating embodied learning into a virtual environment. Through years of facilitating professional development on Zoom, we have developed approaches that move beyond lecture-style instruction and engage participants in multi-modal learning. In virtual trainings, educators are invited to watch, embody, reflect, and create from their own environments.
The primary differences between virtual and in-person training are cost and convenience. Virtual trainings do not incur travel fees and allow educators to participate from anywhere, while in-person trainings offer the opportunity to learn and collaborate together in a shared physical space.