When Practice Truly Makes Perfect

Troy Dwyer is an acting-styles trainer whose areas of expertise include classical lyric performance (such as Shakespeare), the Absurd (such as Beckett) and contemporary realism (such as the methodologies of Sanford Meisner). Troy is a critical teaching focuses on queer theories and histories of performance as well as on specifically queer performance practices, such as drag performance.

When we transitioned to remote learning this past spring, my students were about to present graded Shakespeare monologues. Instead of performing their pieces live in real-time, I asked them to video-record and upload their performances to discussion threads on Canvas. Though I was seeking an organized way for students to provide one another performance feedback, there ended up being a major unexpected benefit to this approach.


For an in-person class, a student would normally have a single shot to execute their performance. However, because my remote students were submitting videos, they had the luxury of recording multiple “takes” in order to submit the recording they liked best. As a result, the final performances the students uploaded were STELLAR.

After the assignment, I learned that almost all of them videoed dozens of takes, and more than a few recorded 40 or 50 takes, or more. The level of engagement with the assignment was extremely high. They were able to analyze and critique their own work immediately by viewing each video take as soon as it was shot, and then re-shoot if they felt they hadn’t nailed particular feats on which they knew they’d be graded. And as they re-shot and re-shot, they developed increasing fluency with the principles of the assignment – they got increasingly BETTER, all without my direct oversight. Several even reached out to one another with the request to review takes, and tell them which they thought was the best, and why. That is, they were having detailed discussions about the course content, splitting hairs, sharing insights, and deepening their understanding – and I didn’t even know any of this was going on until after the assignment had concluded.

The level of self-challenge was much higher than anything I could’ve shepherded on my own, and it sparked wonderfully deep learning.