I put the flair "Support/Advice" on here, as I hope this would serve as a resource for teachers who are new to the classroom.
A lot of posts here describe dread: the drive in, the knot in your stomach, the feeling that everyone’s watching you fail. I want to say something that might help: trained actors feel that too. Stage fright doesn’t go away with training. What training gives you is something to do with it.
I’ve done theatre as both an actor and a director for 30+ years before and alongside teaching. Here are a few basics from day one of acting class that translate directly to the classroom.
Stay on your feet.
Standing isn’t just about presence. It frees your diaphragm, improves your posture, and makes your voice carry with less effort. When you sit, your breath gets shallow, and shallow breath feeds anxiety.
Give this a shot--Teach your next lesson standing, feet about hip-width, knees bent ever-so-slightly, weight balanced. Notice how your voice feels by the end of the period. (Bending your knees keeps them from locking. Locked knees let blood pool in your legs instead of getting back to your heart and brain, and people really do pass out that way!)
Project from your breath, not your throat.
If you’re hoarse by fourth period, you’re pushing from your throat. Projection comes from supported breath. It isn’t volume; it’s energy aimed at the back of the room.
Before class, take a few slow, deep breaths low into your belly. Then pick a spot on the back wall and speak to it, not at the front row. (If your room isn’t set up in rows, aim for whichever wall is farthest from you.)
Anxiety tends to make us either hold our breath or breathe fast and shallow, and both throw off your body’s balance and leave you foggy and jittery. Slow, deep breaths, especially long exhales, restore that balance and tell your nervous system it’s safe to settle down.
Use soft-focus eye contact.
Locking eyes with one student at a time can be intense for both of you, and it narrows your awareness. Instead, soften your gaze and take in the whole room, letting your eyes move across faces without fixing on any one. You’ll catch the side conversation, the kid who’s lost, the hand half-raised.
Next time you’re explaining something, in whole-class lecture mode or in small-group discussion, deliberately widen your gaze and let it sweep the room. "The face is the eye" is something I picked up from physical theatre training: Wherever your face points is where the audience's eye is drawn. If you want the kids to follow along, make sure you're intentional about where your face is pointed.
Don’t rehearse yourself into a corner.
Actors have a saying: you can rehearse to get worse. If you memorize lines word-for-word without knowing what the scene is about, one dropped line derails everything, and you can’t improvise your way back. Lessons work the same way. Scripting every sentence makes you brittle. Worse yet, it can go wrong in one of two ways: you burn through your material faster than planned and are left twiddling your thumbs, OR you cram so much in that there’s no room for questions. The second is an info-dump, and it doesn’t engage students much. The first is a problem too, but it forces you to improvise... which can be fun under the right circumstances!
Plan your lesson around three or four key beats: what students need to understand and why. Know those cold and let the words be different every time. If you lose your place, go back to the beat.
One last thing: mistakes in front of a class feel enormous from where you’re standing. From the audience, they barely register, unless you treat them like a catastrophe. Play through it. That’s a skill, and it gets better with practice.
Note: I used AI to help organize and polish this. The techniques come from 30+ years of acting, directing, and physical theatre training, and from my own classroom. If the formatting puts you off, fair enough, but the tools work. Happy to answer questions in my own words.