Journaling as Assessment in the Dance Classroom

I recently wrote about why I started journaling with my students and how I make it work inside a 45-minute dance class. If you missed that post, start there. This one is about something different. Assessment. Because once you stop treating journals as a reflection activity and start treating them as assessment, they become one of the most useful tools in the room.

Here’s the distinction. A reflection activity is something you tack onto the end of a lesson so students can “think about their learning.” That works. I’m not against reflection. But assessment answers a different question. Assessment tells you what a student knows, how they’re thinking, and where they are relative to where they need to be. It gives you evidence you can actually use. Most dance teachers I work with haven’t considered how journals can do that job.

That’s partly because assessment in dance education is almost always performance-based. A rubric for a show. Teacher observation while students rehearse. A real-time checklist for observable skills. Those tools measure execution. They tell you whether a student can perform a phrase with correct timing or hit a formation change. What they don’t reveal is the thinking behind the movement.

You can watch a student dance and still have no idea why they made a choreographic choice. You also won’t know how they’re connecting what happens in your class to something outside of it: another performance they saw, a memory, something happening in a friendship.

And you definitely won’t know what they actually think about dance. Thinking, whether we measure it or not, is half the standards. If you’ve looked at the National Core Arts Standards for dance, you know they’re organized around four artistic processes: Creating, Performing, Responding, and Connecting. Two of those — Responding and Connecting — mostly live inside a student’s head. You can’t observe a student “connecting dance to personal experience” by watching them perform a combination across the floor. That information is invisible unless the student tells you, which is where journals come in.

A journal is one of the simplest access points to a student’s thinking. It allows you to read it, track it, and use it to plan instruction. Take Responding. The standard asks students to analyze and interpret dance. In a whole-class discussion, you might ask: “What did you notice about how they used levels? ”Two hands go up. Maybe three. Someone says, “They went low.” That’s usually where the conversation stops.

But when students write… instead of speaking. Something different happens. A third grader might write that every time the dancer dropped to the floor, the movement slowed down. Another might say the dance “looked angry at the floor.” Both of those are analyses. Both show interpretation. And both are things I would never have heard if I relied solely on whole-group discussion.

Writing slows students down just enough for the observation to show up. Connecting is even harder to assess without writing. The standard asks students to relate dance to personal, cultural, or community experiences. That kind of thinking rarely surfaces during a performance. But I’ve had students write things like: “This dance reminds me of my grandmother when she’s cooking.” That sentence contains a connection between movement and lived experience. That’s the standard. And it’s sitting right there in a composition notebook.

Creating and Performing are easier to assess through observation. That part most dance teachers already understand. But journals add something you can’t see from the front of the room: the reasoning behind the choices. When a student writes, “I put the fast part after the slow part because I wanted the audience to wake up,” they’re talking about artistic intent. That’s different from a teacher watching the dance and deciding it had good contrast. The performance shows the product. The journal shows the thinking. You need both.

For clarity, I don’t grade journals. I’m not putting a rubric on a kid’s emotional response to a selection of music. But I do read them. And as I read, I interpret what I’m seeing through the lens of creating, performing, responding, and connecting. After a few weeks, patterns start to show up. Maybe students write beautiful reflections about how dances make them feel (Responding), but when I ask why they structured choreography a certain way (Creating), the answers are thin.

That tells me something about my teaching.

Maybe I’m not giving students enough space to talk about creative decisions before they write about them. Maybe my prompts are too vague. The journal entries point me to the adjustment.

Journals also give you something concrete to show other people. Dance teachers spend a lot of time explaining that what happens in the studio is academic,  that it connects to literacy, critical thinking, and the larger goals of the school. Journals help make that visible. A principal can flip through a stack of notebooks and see students analyzing movement, interpreting performances, and making connections to their lives. That’s not fluff. That’s literacy.

The key is the prompt.

A weak question produces weak writing. Ask “How did you feel about class today?” and you’ll get “good” twenty-five times. But ask students to: “Describe one choice you made during choreography today and why you made it,” and suddenly you have twenty-five windows into student thinking. The prompt does most of the work.

When I talk to teachers about journaling, they always ask for the prompts. So naturally, we have organized more than 100 journal prompts by the four NCAS artistic processes and by grade band: K-2, 3-5, and 6-8.

Each one is designed to generate a response that can serve as real evidence of student understanding. They’re free when you sign up for the Brave Art NYC membership.

You don’t need to journal every class. You don’t need to grade every entry. But if you want to assess the parts of dance that aren’t visible from the front of the room, start handing out notebooks.