The Teacher As Actor Part One: Plan Tight, but Hang Loose
“All the tedious research is worth one inspired moment.”
Uta Hagen, Respect for Acting
When I was growing up, I wanted to be an actress. I was in school plays, community plays, and high school theatre competitions. I won the Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship and headed to Salem State as a theatre major and an education minor. In my first year at Salem State, I landed the role of Agnes in Agnes of God. That was the highlight, but my heart wasn’t in the classes I was taking. Within a year, I realized that acting for a career wasn’t for me and that teaching was my jam.
I always knew that many of my strengths as a teacher were related to my acting background. It has always been hard for me to pinpoint it though. Other than all the voices I do during read aloud, I find it hard to crystallize what about me being an actor informs my teaching. So I dug into some research and am realizing that it informs everything.
In researching the parallels between teaching and acting, I found a video of Jane Cox teaching this very thing. Make sure to check out Episode 68 The Teacher As Actor with Jane Cox. You can also hear her lecture here.
I also ordered a book on Amazon from 1992 called Teacher as Actor by Dr. Morris U. Burns and Dr. Porter S Woods. I will share little gems from this book in this Teacher As Actor blog post series. It is centered mostly around college lecture teaching, but still offers great parallels to all teaching.
As I was reading Teacher as Actor, it reminded me that years ago my husband bought me Jenna Fischer’s The Actor’s Life for my birthday. I will share her insights as well in this series.
Lastly, I began listening to a podcast that is for actors and is chock full of examples of how acting and teaching are alike…if you listen carefully. The podcast is called I Don’t Need an Acting Class and it’s hosted by Emmy and Academy Award winning producer and celebrated acting teacher, Milton Justice. Milton will be on The Teacher As…podcast soon to talk about the Teacher As Actor. I will share many of his insights from his podcast in this series as well.
“Know the map of your part, then free yourself to play the role moment to moment.”
Richard Digby Day, Director of England’s Nottingham Playhouse
Early on in my teaching career, I remember hearing the phrase, “Plan tight, but hang loose.” It became my motto throughout my thirty plus years of teaching. Lessons always went better when I was prepared for a few reasons.
I am more relaxed when I know what I am doing and what the learning goal/s are for the students.
Knowing the lesson allows me to then find the fun in it and how I want to “sell” the learning goal/task; what will be my hook?
Being relaxed allows me to focus more on the students in the moment to gauge their learning.
Knowing the lesson content/goals well allows me to know where I can change things up if need be.
In addition, when I go through all the goals for the unit we are in, I know what is coming and I know how students will eventually be assessed. This helps me decide in the moment what can be skipped if time is running short or what should be emphasized the most.
The planning and prep for teaching is analogous to the research and preparation that an actor does, but then once “on stage” the teacher and actor can be present and react in the moment. It is not really improvisation since it is mostly planned, but in the moment, with all the decisions we make based on the students’ behaviors, attention, it feels more like improv to me. Some improv does follow a structure and then within that structure the actors create. I am still thinking and researching about the parallels of improv acting and teaching. When I spontaneously break out into the ROYGBIV song by They Might Be Giants as we are learning about the spectrum of light, that certainly wasn’t planned.
In the video below, Viola Davis talks about her preparation and collaboration with other actors. There is a fine line between being prepared and over preparing to the point where you are not able to react to what the other actor is giving you. In the classroom, the students are the other actors that we need to be present for and react to in the moment.
In the Actor’s Life, Jenna Fischer writes about the realities of preparation the night before. She talks about being sent the updated script as late as 10:00 at night and taking the time to see if there have been any changes and any new lines to learn. It is all about being as prepared as possible, but remaining flexible when, for example, she gets to set in the morning and they hand her sides with new lines or another actor is sick and they have to do a completely different scene. Scripts and schedules change on a set…sound familiar?
I am teaching full time and have three podcasts (The Teacher As, Ponzinomics101, and our school podcast), but I hope to jump on here once a week for this series to write a post about an aspect of The Teacher As Actor until I run out of content. There are so many parallels to share.