Drama Strategy: Thought-tracking

Thought-tracking is a strategy that enables us to listen together to a character's inner thoughts at a particular moment in the drama. At its simplest, the action is frozen and the teacher touches a character on the shoulder. This is the signal for that person to speak aloud their ‘in role’ thoughts. To avoid touching students, teachers can set up a different signal, for example the teacher could stand near the character and signal/mime that they are listening to them. We can use thought-tracking to:

Thought-tracking can be ‘set up’ in various ways:

Individual and collective thoughts: The inner thoughts of one character might be spoken by only the person role-playing that character. Alternatively, several people might be asked to speak out loud the one character's inner thoughts. When several students speak the thoughts of one character, they are all identifying with that character and building their shared understanding of that character through inter-thinking.