Why Actors Make Good Tutors

Over the past two decades, I’ve collaborated with many tutors, and what links almost all of them is their background in acting. Many have trained at BFA/MFA programs or studied in private classes for years; many pursue acting along with other creative pursuits. And most of them are wonderful tutors. 

I had my own stint in acting before I switched to a more practical career (tutoring!). Ironically, I began tutoring to pay the rent while I completed a two-year acting workshop in New York City. That program changed my life because it taught me how to become aware of, access, and develop parts of myself I never knew existed. I found the often counterintuitive, sometimes ridiculous acting exercises to be invaluable when it came to working with my first students. I saw how they needed help breaking free from their habitual approaches to their schoolwork. The tutoring process gave them the opportunity to “change the script” and reinvent themselves as a different kind of student.

I never did get very far in the acting world, but since 2004 I’ve frequently been cast as… a tutor. I often come back to those compelling acting ideas when I tutor, and it has been encouraging to discover that many other long-time, professional tutors see a close connection between acting training and tutoring.

School lessons reinforce cerebral engagement, but acting is experiential. Acting requires a deeper commitment of the self—both to the text and to the partner. Acting also demands a heightened and encompassing awareness: “Who am I and what does it mean to transform into someone else?” The actor comes to think a certain way: “I’m this sort of person, but with experimentation and repetition, I can try to change.” It’s an instructive way of approaching all creative challenges and schoolwork is no exception.

From my own experiences and from my many collaborations, I’ve concluded that there are six reasons why actors make good tutors:

1. Actors lead with empathy. When approaching a role, the actor must not judge the character, but work to appreciate all the aspects of the person he is trying to inhabit. Actor-tutors encounter students not from a place of judgement—looking only at what the student is doing wrong—but aim to connect the student to her deepest self, one that naturally might be filled with curiosity, undeveloped skill, fear and doubt. Actor-tutors develop a holistic sense of students as three-dimensional human beings, and not merely as academic machines. They entrain themselves to the student to understand all the ways he strives, struggles, succeeds, fights, flees. 

2. Actors are trained to partner. I tell tutors in training that their task isn’t to teach the material, it’s to teach the student. Actors recognize an authentic exchange between themselves and their scene partners. They know when the connection is shallow, lacking in mutualism. They know how to adjust and try a new way to promote a deeper connection, and they invest more energy to achieve a heightened responsiveness. Increasing the energy coming from the student is a key strategy that the actor-tutor can use to change the dynamic of learning. 

3. Actors have a keen sense of what it means to play a role. Some students need a tutor-disciplinarian; others need a best friend or a big brother/sister. Some students need a tutor who stands in for a parent; many others need someone to be the opposite of a parent. Actor-tutors must shape-shift, playing one role with one student, another with the next. 

4. Actors practice creativity as part of developing their craft. The world of the playwright/screenwriter can be mysterious and dense, and an actor needs the internal and external flexibility to adapt to each script. Playfulness—it’s called a “play” for a reason—is key. If one approach isn’t working, the actor has to risk looking foolish by trying something new to find a way into an imaginary world. This creative, idiosyncratic approach to the work—so different from just “doing a good job,” or being competent in the role—is what reveals the actor’s talent. Students, too, must be willing to risk looking stupid or being wrong as they create new approaches to algebra, or English composition, or computer science. Creativity requires finding possibilities when dead ends threaten. 

5. Actors work by repetition. On a technical level, actors must go over (and over, and over) a particular line of text many times, in rehearsal and independently, before they feel capable of realizing an acting moment with confidence. (The word for “rehearsal” in French is actually “répétition.) Outside the rehearsal room, actors call this work “studying lines.” It’s the same kind of studying that students must do in math, or biology, or French class. Repetition (auditory, visual, kinesthetic) leads to automaticity, a fine-tuning of one’s instrument that promotes confidence and, eventually, mastery.

6. Actors are often unemployed. Most actors are employed only sporadically, and need gig work to make ends meet between jobs (which is unfortunately often). Having well-paying work that can fit before or after rehearsals, on weekends, or late at night, can help actors survive the realities of an inconsistent career. Actors are available and hungry for work, eager to build rapport with a student and to share in the journey of learning. 

It should be explicitly said that acting training alone isn’t qualification enough to help a student struggling with a particular academic subject; the actor-tutor must also have in-depth knowledge of the content. But acting training will inform how the tutor works with the student, if not what they’re studying.

So if you’re a parent looking for a tutor for your child, don’t get caught up in how many PhDs they have, or whether they have classroom experience. An actor-tutor might be your best bet to make the kind of connection with your child that can make all the difference.