Another thing they do is mirroring. It helps if the studio is set up to work this way but basically the students face each other and one is the performer and the other is the mirror. You have to mirror what the performer is doing.
One thing I used to love about S factor is that they dedicated a portion of class to freestyle where one person was on the main pole and then they had 2 back up dancers. You brought your song loaded and ready to go and the instructor plugged in your ipod/player for your dance. This way either you had a song that you wanted to dance out or you got to move to a song that maybe was not your style.