We recently connected with Tamara Irving and have shared our conversation below.

Tamara, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I came to the classroom from a background in marketing and professional dance. My educational journey started when I left the Us National Tour of The Lion King and needed to find stability while still utilizing my gift of dance. Due to limited support in many school districts for arts educators, I was led to create a consulting firm that supported arts education programs. TMI Design and Consulting is committed to supporting Arts educators by developing arts curricula and facilitating teacher training and professional development programs infused with career and leadership skills practices with the goal of enhancing learning experiences.

Basically in my first few years in the classroom, I was doing good work but I was also lost in the art of teaching and truly building a dance program. I had mentors and I invested in a few programs to help me find that professional development but I truly needed something like the company I created to give me what I needed. If anything, dance educators need to be able to meet with other dance educators to bounce ideas and co-plan because we get each other. Many times we are lumped in with other subjects and while that is fine to start, we need to be able to learn with our own content focused approaches.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I came to the classroom after many years on the stage, I actually came back to teach at my alma mater. Teaching dance was a natural transition and I began to love it, though still needed support. I crafted my dance program using what I brought to the table as well as the many unique experiences of my students….many who did not even want to pursue dance. I help dance educators develop their own signature dance programs while also making sure they don’t forget about their own personal and professional growth. I provide professional development, teacher mentoring and coaching, as well as mini trainings and courses to develop teachers. I am most proud that I was able to serve several districts locally therefore I can physically visit their classrooms to provide hands on support. I am available to hire for travel though ha! I want potential clients to know that they have everything they need to succeed they just may need support shaping it to serve their students. I also fell in love with producing dance related content and films over the pandemic. This is how I also shifted to project management in the arts as I served as a production manager for a dance film based on the first Black Dance Studios in Atlanta. I co-wrote a grant to make this project available and I can’t wait to see how we grow.

I love lists, charts, Trello and anything that can help organize me. It is how I managed to keep it together while teaching AND how I am able to run my business successfully because I had so much content already organized not knowing how it would truly serve me in the future!

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

The best source of new clients for me are word of mouth and referrals. I consider myself the ‘Amazon of Arts Teachers’. Whenever someone in the K12 sector or even in the dance studio sector needed a suggestion for a guest teacher, lesson, resource, I always had a recommendation ready to roll off my tongue.

It has been amazing having former colleagues tell another colleague about my services and how they have worked for their district. The Arts, especially ‘Dance” is such a niche in education so if you have a good resource, me, to share…why not! I am truly grateful for anyone who has mentioned my name as a resource.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I had to learn the difference between dance education and dance performance if I was going to be a great teacher. While I came from a performance background, I knew that I would have the ability to transform students in a unique way however the way that a lot of schools and districts are set up now, realistically what types of students do I serve.

I did not have a dance education background. In fact, my degree was in marketing. So my journey to the classroom was a little bit different than maybe some other arts teachers. So once I decided I was going to become a teacher, I had been working with the students at my school coming in to do guest choreography. And then the position became available, I was able to acquire the position, but I was only able to get a temporary permit to come in to teach. Eventually, I had to get a full teaching certificate. And that was a lot of work. But it was well worth it. I had to learn a lot alongside my students and I had some challenges when I first started teaching. So as a dancer, I consider my background to be modern based dance, with experience in jazz, ballet and West African. There are so many other types of dance that can be taught. But those are my strengths. However, if I was to teach a student who is very strong in ballet, I would say that I may not be as strong as that student. So I know that that was one of my challenges, that I want it to be better in certain techniques so that I can instruct them in class without feeling like I was not competent as a teacher. Some of my stress were that I did have professional experience, I know how to give them performance experience because I’ve been in that place. I also new ways that they can incorporate business into the classroom because I do have experience with that. So I believe that that was one of my strengths. Another one of my challenges, honestly was that when I first started teaching, I did not know certain acronyms. I did not know what certain things were. And I did not know what a standard was. I’m sure they might have been around when I was in high school, but I honestly didn’t know. So Though the first thing I had to know was how to create a lesson plan. And I had never created the lesson plan in my life because I hadn’t had to.

As an educator, it’s important to understand dance in an educational setting, before you create your curriculum. The discipline of dance in educational settings concentrates on process, with performances coming out of that process, rather than the goal of producing just to produce for performances. Ideally, we want dance education to start when children are very young. And we would love for them to matriculate through elementary middle in high school with the dance as an option. But a lot of times, it does not work that way. Dance is a component of arts education. And it’s important to understand why and what it came from. To sum it up, I had to unlearn my ways of teaching and dancing and shift them to better serve my students.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://tamarairving.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tmi.design.consulting/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TMI.Design.Consulting/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamara-irving/
• Other: https://linktr.ee/tmi.design.consulting

Image Credits
yellow pic: Angela Harris headshots: Shoccara Marcus