Process Drama: Why it matters

At Lucy School, we embrace Process Drama, a distinctive approach that prioritizes immersion, exploration, and the journey over the outcome. Unlike traditional drama, which focuses on staging a show, Process Drama emphasizes interactive engagement, allowing students to “live through” the experience and, by doing so, naturally develop new cognitive connections.

Process Drama uses the basics of theatre—pretending to be someone or somewhere else—to collaboratively explore a problem, situation, theme, or series of related ideas, with the teacher, who guides the work.

Why it matters:

Process Drama with young children drives many areas of development and learning, particularly literacy skills and social-emotional intelligence.

Brain science shows that emotional engagement is critical to unlocking cognitive processing and learning. Process Drama capitalizes on children’s natural capacity for pretend play and cultivates community, collaboration, problem-solving, creativity, empathy, and compassion—all abstract and complex concepts. This immersive approach taps into emotional engagement, unlocking cognitive processing and fostering genuine enthusiasm for learning.