Macbeth intervention drill: free (AQA GCSE)

A complete, ready-to-teach 25-minute intervention session for AQA GCSE English Literature Paper 1, Section A: how Macbeth reacts when the first prophecy comes true. It is the first drill in our Raising Achievement set for Macbeth, a series of thirty short sessions built for Year 11 intervention, revision lessons and small-group catch-up.

The set follows Macbeth from the shaken man of Act 1 to the tyrant of Act 5, one big moment at a time. The most common error is writing about him as a real person (‘Macbeth is evil’) rather than as Shakespeare’s creation (‘Shakespeare presents Macbeth as…’), and the teacher guide shows how to push students away from retelling the plot and towards one word and what it suggests.

Every drill runs the same routine, so students know what is coming and the session starts on time. A Do Now of five quick retrieval questions, answered in silence and self-marked. A focus reminder: what the skill or exam question asks for, in three or four plain points. Read and check: the extract with line numbers, then quick questions to make sure everyone has understood it. A quotation explosion: one important quotation, exploded through AO1, AO2 and AO3 questions. One technique, modelled on the extract. Then the question itself, in AQA’s wording: students plan an answer or write the introduction in eight minutes, never a full essay, and compare their work with a model. A second short task, Have a go, applies the same skill to a new moment, and a green pen checklist lets students improve their answer before the sheets are collected.

Why short drills? Year 11 intervention often turns into a second go at the lesson, or an hour of essay writing that leaves no time for feedback. These sessions are deliberately narrow: one moment, one quotation or one question type, practised at pace. Literature drills stop at the plan or the introduction because that is where marks are usually won or lost, and because a plan can be checked and improved in the same session. The routine also makes the drills easy to hand to a colleague, a cover teacher or a tutor, since the slides carry teacher notes on every slide.

What you get: the editable PowerPoint slides with notes on every slide, the printable student sheet in Word and PDF, and a short teacher guide that explains the routine, the common errors to watch for in this topic and how to run the session at pace. Answers and a model are included, so the drill can be self-marked or peer-marked.

Who it is for: Year 10 and Year 11 classes, intervention groups, revision sessions and post-16 resit groups where relevant. It works with a whole class on the board or with a small group round a table, and it needs nothing but the sheet and a pen. Written by an experienced secondary English teacher for the AQA specification, and free to use and adapt in your school.