The Problem with Keeping It in Your Head
Active instructors typically know between 50 and 200 dances. Of those, maybe 30 are genuinely class-ready, another 20 need a refresh, and a dozen are on your "I keep meaning to learn that" list. Without a system, you default to the same 15 dances every class, forget dances you once knew, and lose track of what your dancers have been asking for.
BootStepper's library tools exist to replace the mental overhead with a structure you can actually maintain.
Favorites: Your Quick-Save Layer
The simplest starting point is the heart icon on any dance page. Favoriting a dance saves it to your personal Favorites collection, which lives under your account and is always a single click away. Use it liberally—there's no penalty for saving a dance you later decide isn't right for your classes.
Favorites is a flat list, which makes it good for browsing and quick retrieval but less useful for tracking stage or intent. That's where labelled collections come in.
Build Collections Around Your Learning Stages
The most useful library structure is a set of collections built around where each dance sits in your personal progression. Create one collection per label and give each a clear name:
- Want to Learn — dances you've spotted but haven't started yet. Your wishlist. Keep it long; you'll never run out of ideas.
- Learning — dances in active rotation. You can do them, but they need more miles before you'd put them in a class.
- Learned — solid, floor-ready. You could teach tomorrow.
- Taught — proven in front of a class. Your core teaching repertoire.
- Requests — dances your dancers have asked for. Separate from your own preferences; this is what the floor wants.
When you finish a dance, move it from Learning → Learned → Taught. The movement itself is useful: it signals that you've crossed a threshold, and it means your Learned collection is never stale.
Using Collection Labels in BootStepper
When you create or edit a collection, you can assign it a label from the supported set. These labels do more than colour-code: they're filterable. On the Collections page, you can filter by label to surface only your Want to Learn or Taught collections without having to scroll through everything else.
Labels also carry intent. A collection labelled requests is understood differently from one labelled learned—even if someone else finds it, the label explains its purpose immediately.
Filter Your Library, Not Just Your Search
Once your library is built in collections, the real leverage comes from filtering. On the Dances page, the Favorites Only toggle (under User Filters in the filter panel) limits results to dances you've saved. The Followed Only toggle does the same for choreographers you follow.
Combined with difficulty and count filters, this means you can answer questions like "what beginner dances do I know that are under 48 counts?" in about ten seconds, without leaving the page.
Keep the Library Current
A library is only useful if it reflects reality. Schedule a five-minute review once a month: scan your Learning collection, move anything you haven't touched in eight weeks back to Want to Learn, and move anything you've been drilling into Learned. It doesn't need to be precise—the goal is preventing the library from diverging too far from what you actually know.
The Requests collection benefits from a similar cadence. After each social, add the dances people asked for that night. Over a few months, patterns emerge: the same three dances keep appearing, which tells you exactly what to prioritise in your next learning block.
Organising by Choreographer or Style
Beyond learning stages, some instructors keep parallel collections organised by choreographer or style. A "Jo Thompson dances" or "Country Two-Step collection" can be useful when planning themed classes or workshops. These sit alongside your progression-based collections and use the same tools—just with a different organising principle.
The dance filters' choreographer filter makes building these easy: search for a choreographer by name, toggle Favorites Only if you want only dances you already know, and add the results to the themed collection in bulk.