Municipal dance with goals, method, and motivation
A municipal dance school in San Agustín del Guadalix, near Madrid in Spain, set out to find a way to improve dance students’ results and motivation by adopting the RAD teaching method. This wide-ranging and academic piece of work, overseen by Maria Angeles Ruiz Belda, has now been shared with us in both Spanish and English translation, with links below.
Introduction
Often, the challenge for municipal and private schools is striking a balance between maintaining high academic standards and keeping students motivated. While there is greater freedom of action than in formal education, the lack of a shared teaching methodology and clearly defined goals often leads to more limited results. To address this balance, nine years ago, in collaboration with the San Agustín del Guadalix Town Council, we introduced a British educational system to our school, a system that runs from age three through advanced studies.
Who are we?
We are a municipal dance school in San Agustín del Guadalix and we work with an agreement for the cession of spaces with the City Council of our town. We manage the school through a non-profit Cultural Association called Qelium and we seek, in addition to teaching our students to dance, to transmit to them the love for dance and culture.
To this end, we have various levels of the following disciplines: ballet, Spanish dance, flamenco, modern dance and some contemporary and oriental dance groups.
The director of the School has been teaching ballet in San Agustín since 1999 with different formulas of public service: through AMPAS, as a municipal school and now, since 2012, with the aforementioned agreement. The teaching teams of the main disciplines are very stable so, today, we can see results of this continuity.
In addition to teaching our students to dance, we want to transmit to them the love for dance and culture.
In order to motivate our students and achieve the artistic and cultural goals of our association, we never reject the opportunities that are presented to us so that they can express their art to different audiences, travel and get to know other cultural realities or participate in cultural competitions of all kinds. In this sense, we collaborate with the City Council of San Agustín in organising and/or acting in various initiatives: book fair, April fair, patron saint festivities, commemorative events (victims of the holocaust), cultural galas, sports evenings, etc.; but also, we open ourselves to other experiences in our community by participating in dance galas (Gala Virgen de la Paz in Alcobendas 2017, 2018 and 2019), national festivals (Alma y Jaleo 2024 and 2025), visits to other towns to dance (Peñarroya-Pueblonuevo 2024, Lozoyuela 2025) and international festivals to share culture and promote peace (International Youth Festival Wewelsburg 2015 and 2022, Germany; International Folklore Festival, Pazerdjik 2017, Bulgaria).
All these experiences have made us grow as a school and strengthen a feeling of belonging in the students that favours camaraderie and an excellent work environment.
However, despite the enrichment of these complementary activities, having the conviction of the importance of ballet as the academic basis of the rest of the disciplines, nine years ago at this time we considered introducing improvements in this area that could motivate the students, make them advance more technically and enjoy learning to dance better, even if it was more demanding.
What did we need?
In addition to the activity that we develop at the School of Arts of San Agustín del Guadalix, we have a daily collaboration with the two schools of the municipality, teaching dance classes from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.; organizing open classes for families to learn about dance and performing end-of-year shows in the theater of the House of Culture.
The population of these classes is mainly between 3 and 7 or 8 years old. Ages at which it is difficult to find proven methodology to achieve better results in dance in the long term.
The conservatories of Madrid begin working with students from 8 years old, which is the methodology that most teachers in Spain know. But what about the little ones? It is not just about distracting them in class and playing various games that have to do with dance. It is important that we begin to build respecting the evolutionary stages (Piaget, 1972) in the direction of better training later on and a maintenance of motivation in the future (Osorio and López, 25 and 26).
In this sense, having heard good reviews of the system of the Royal Academy of Dance, we set out to get to know it and, if we were convinced, to start applying it…
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