From Actor to Drama Teacher

Lesson content and classroom management for actors new to teaching children and teens

Thursday 4 March 2027, 7pm to 8.30pm (UK time) · Live online · £20. 20% off Early Bird Offer, £16.

You can act. Now someone has asked you to teach. Maybe it's a Saturday theatre school, a youth theatre, an after-school club or a run of workshops in a school. You said yes, and now you're wondering what you'll do with twenty children for an hour and a half, and what happens if they won't listen.

In this 90-minute session I'll share what I've gathered from almost twenty years of teaching drama to children and teenagers in schools, youth theatres, after-school clubs and weekend theatre schools, and from training other teachers to do the same.

We'll cover:

• How to plan a lesson that holds together: warm-up, focus, the main work, sharing, and how long to spend on each
• What to put in it for different ages: what works with eight-year-olds, what works with fifteen-year-olds, and what works with both
• Games are not the main event: how to move a class from drama games into real acting work, and how to adapt your own actor training (Stanislavski, Hagen, Strasberg) so it's safe and right for the age group
• Classroom management from the first minute: the circle, a signal for silence, clear ground rules (no violent content, no impressions of classmates or teachers, no humour at someone else's expense), positive discipline, and never putting a student on the spot
• The wobbles every new teacher hits: the group that won't settle, the student who refuses, running out of material, and the moment it all goes quiet

You'll come away with a lesson structure you can reuse for years, a bank of exercises to fill it with, drawn from my books 100 Acting Exercises for 8–18 Year Olds and Acting Games for Improv, and a clearer sense of what you're doing when you walk through the door. There'll be time for your questions at the end.

Who it's for: actors and drama graduates taking on teaching work for the first time, whether that's a franchise theatre school (Stagecoach, PQA and the like), a youth theatre, an after-school club, a holiday course or workshops in schools. Also useful if you've been teaching for a while and were never shown the basics. Pitched at teaching ages 8 to 18.

Teaching four- to seven-year-olds as well? My session Teaching Drama to Early Years on 18 March goes deeper on the little ones.

Details

When: Thursday 4 March 2027, 7pm to 8.30pm (UK time) Where: Live online. You'll be sent the link after booking. Cost: £20

About Sam

Sam Marsden is a best-selling author and drama teacher with over 20 years in the field. She is the author of 100 Acting Exercises for 8–18 Year Olds (Bloomsbury) and the Pocketful of Drama series (Morpho Press), which includes Acting Games for Improv, Drama Games for Mindfulness and Emotional Health, Drama Games for Early Years (4–7 Years), Acting Exercises for Creative Writing and Focus Games for the Classroom. She trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, writes on drama education for The Stage, Teach Primary and Edutopia, and runs CPD for drama teachers online and at RADA.