Our Macbeth Unit Plan: Two Approaches That Actually Worked

“Double, double toil and trouble” may be the most famous line from Macbeth, but it’s far from our favorite.

Is it when Macbeth declares that “all great Neptune’s ocean” cannot cleanse Duncan’s blood from his hands, but instead his “hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red”? That word incarnadine is . . . chef’s kiss.

Or, perhaps, when he declares that, in killing Duncan, “we have scorched the snake, not killed it”?

Maybe it’s when he decides that “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er”? Who among us hasn’t felt that sense of weary resignation?

It took us over a decade—and a new textbook—to start teaching Macbeth. When we began developing a Macbeth unit plan for our standard-level sophomores, we wondered why it took us so long. Macbeth has everything going for it—rich characters, an action-driven plot, torrents of blood, compelling (and all too prescient) themes of ambition and power.

And the play is both ripe for analysis and relatively accessible. Macbeth undergoes such a dramatic change that it’s easy for students to see while still allowing for sophisticated analysis. The lines, as in some of our favorites above, are packed with figurative language that students of all levels can analyze.

One of our deepest-held beliefs as teachers is that any text can be a compelling learning experience for any student. Different students need different supports to access the text in a meaningful way, but you can build a Macbeth unit plan that works for struggling readers and another one that challenges AP Literature students using the same text.

We’re eager to share our approach to teaching Macbeth at both levels—what worked, what didn’t, and what stayed the same no matter who was in the room.

Our Standard-Level Macbeth Unit Plan: Meeting Students Where They Are

The Text You Use Matters

We use Leon Garfield’s prose adaptations from Shakespeare Stories as our primary text when teaching Shakespeare to our standard-level students, an approach we’ve used successfully for both Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet.

We taught at a Title 1 school with a large ELL population where many students read below grade level. The prose narration allowed them to understand the basic plot and engage in analysis without the language barrier of the original text.

But Garfield’s adaptations also use lines from the play as dialogue, and we selected a key scene from the original play—when Macbeth and Banquo receive their prophecies from the witches—to close read together. Our students got exposure to and practice with Shakespeare’s language, but in a way that felt manageable.

When teaching Macbeth to struggling readers, it’s essential to remember that this isn’t “dumbing down” the text—it’s removing one barrier (in this case, Shakespeare’s language) so that students can access the story and engage in analytical thinking about its characters and themes.

Scaffold the Reading Process

We relied heavily on Actively Learn to help us scaffold reading for students of all levels—it allowed us to embed questions, videos, definitions, and images that helped our students navigate a wide variety of texts.

We divided the text into five parts (aligned with the five acts) and embedded questions throughout. Here’s what this looked like in practice:

We read the text aloud in class, pausing for students to answer the questions and monitoring their responses in real-time to provide additional context and explanation as needed.

The reading portion of the unit took approximately 14 class periods: we spent about two periods reading each act (including the close read) and completing the accompanying Actively Learn assignment. Then, we gave students a cloze summary to help them review for the multiple-choice exam.

The Essay That Worked (and One That Didn’t)

The first time we developed our Macbeth unit plan, we used as many of the materials and ideas in our textbook as possible. The text was part of a larger unit that explored the essential question, “How much of what happens in our lives do we control?”

The textbook’s essay prompt asked students to consider whether fate or Macbeth was responsible for the fulfillment of the witches’ prophecies. Despite our attempts to scaffold the writing process for our students with an evidence bank, a predetermined 5-paragraph structure, and sentence-by-sentence directions aligned with our 5C paragraph format, the essay fell flat.

Upon reflection, we realized the problem: you can’t answer that question with evidence from the play, and more importantly, it doesn’t matter. The play’s themes explore unchecked ambition and the corrupting influence of power, not the existence of fate.

Our students had an easier time addressing the prompt we replaced it with: how the desire for power changes Macbeth’s character over the course of the play. Similar to our LEGO Batman paragraph activity and our Night essay, students selected adjectives that described Macbeth at the beginning, middle, and end of the play using quotations from an evidence bank and connecting their argument to an overarching theme.

The shift was a helpful reminder that textbook-provided essential questions sometimes sound good in theory but don’t always reflect what a text is actually about, and it’s okay to adjust when this happens.

Our AP Literature Macbeth Unit Plan: Building Independence and Analytical Depth

Why Macbeth?

For our first ten years teaching AP Lit, we actually didn’t read a Shakespeare play. Kate had attended an AP Summer Institute that recommended against it because students often struggle to achieve the depth of understanding necessary to write a high-scoring essay (Q3) about it on the AP exam.

But, as big believers in helping our students build their cultural toolkit, we began to feel like we were doing them an injustice by not reading one of the major tragedies together. We initially tried Hamlet, and while it wasn’t a flop, the length and philosophizing bogged down the reading experience.

After teaching Macbeth to our sophomores, however, we realized it would be the perfect fit for AP Literature: it offers students ample opportunities to develop their analytical skills, but the action-oriented plot drives the reading forward and maintains student engagement. Macbeth required less hand-holding than Hamlet.

The Pre-Reading Strategy

We actually gave our seniors a couple of days to read the same Leon Garfield prose version of the play that we gave our sophomores as a pre-reading activity. By frontloading the plot, we enabled them to focus on Shakespeare’s language and analysis when they read the original text, removing the “What’s happening” barrier so they could engage with what the details meant.

Independent Reading with Guided Questions

Students read one act at a time through Actively Learn with embedded questions and supports. Each act included approximately 17 multiple-choice questions (comprehension and analysis), two short-answer questions in 5C format, and self-reflection questions with video summaries—similar scaffolding to our sophomore approach but with higher expectations for independence and analysis.

The Pandemic Pivot That Became Our Best Unit

When we first developed our Macbeth unit plan in AP Literature, we followed our traditional novel unit plan format: students read the text independently before engaging in a guided discussion that prepared them for the final writing assessment.

But during the pandemic, we quickly realized that our traditional discussion format wouldn’t work. We were forced to try something different, and it ultimately turned out to be better.

After reading each act, students watched a short screencast in which we reviewed key points, including common errors from the guided reading assignment.

Twice during the reading (once for Acts 1–2 and once for Acts 3–5), however, we assigned students to work in groups on a collaborative close reading analysis using the discussion board feature on Canvas. We used the same highly structured approach we had been using all year—assigning specific tasks to individual students, setting midpoint due dates, and monitoring students’ conversations on the boards.

Each group analyzed a different soliloquy and drafted a literary analysis paragraph in which they identified two literary devices that Shakespeare used to convey meaning—essentially a condensed version of the poetry analysis essay (Q2) they would write for the AP exam.

Afterward, we recorded screencasts that provided feedback on each paragraph, identifying both strengths and areas for improvement. To ensure students watched them, we incorporated questions about these screencasts on the final exam for the unit.

At the end of the play, we used our collaborative discussion board activity structure to have students write a thematic analysis paragraph about the play as a whole. We assigned each group a topic and character combination: ambition/Lady Macbeth; ambition/Macbeth; power/Macbeth; guilt/Lady Macbeth; guilt/Macbeth; and fate/Macbeth. (On this last one, we tried to avoid the issue with our standard-level essential questions unit by reminding students to focus not on whether fate/destiny is real but on its effects on someone who believes it to be real.)

Students had to craft a theme statement and write a body paragraph with two pieces of evidence in support of that theme—a mini-version of what they would have to do for their final essay on the text.

By assigning different topics/characters and having students view all groups’ screencasts, we showed them that texts have multiple valid themes and interpretations.

Two Caveats

This unit took a long time (which we justified since students were also practicing their poetry analysis skills), and our students resisted being pushed to take responsibility for their own interpretations instead of dutifully taking notes on the “correct” interpretation.

But it was the best unit we’ve ever taught. The discussion board approach led to the most tangible, visible growth in literary analysis we saw in 14 years of teaching AP Literature. Because we refused to “give” students the answers, they had to work together to form and defend interpretations they’d be evaluated on. They might not have enjoyed it (and perhaps being in person would have allowed us to soften that resistance some), but their final essays demonstrated real growth and understanding of the text.

What Stayed the Same in Each Macbeth Unit Plan (And What That Tells Us)

Despite drastically different scaffolding, some elements were universal to teaching Macbeth well.

Universal Element #1: A Good Story

A good story can be a meaningful reading experience at any level, as long as you provide appropriate scaffolding. The forward momentum created by the action and the themes of ambition and power kept both our standard-level sophomores and our AP Literature students engaged.

For our standard-level sophomores, we explored the language in small ways, saving the bulk of our analysis for character and themes. For our AP Literature students, we spent more time digging into the richness of Shakespeare’s language.

Universal Element #2: Writing Practice

Our standard-level students completed a heavily scaffolded character analysis essay with sentence frames; our AP Literature students wrote multiple collaborative analytical paragraphs. But students at both levels were practicing analytical writing with textual evidence.

The essay our standard-level sophomores wrote was essentially the same essay that our AP Literature students wrote for their final assessment: a five-paragraph essay in support of a theme. While we didn’t explicitly tell our AP students to write about how Macbeth’s character changes over the course of the play, that’s a natural way to support an essay about the play’s theme. The difference was in the scaffolding, not the task itself.

Universal Element #3: Thematic Focus

Themes are where the meaning and power of a story lives, regardless of students’ reading level. Both levels engaged with similar themes—power, ambition, guilt, fate—conveyed through character change. The difference, again, was in how the path to those themes was structured and how independent the students were in identifying those themes.

Universal Element #4: Building Background Knowledge

Both levels needed context to help them navigate the text. The supports we embedded in the Actively Learn assignments helped students with the historical, literary, and linguistic context they needed to understand the play. Even our advanced students benefited from a preview of the story itself.

Since leaving the classroom, we’ve developed an Introduction to Shakespeare Escape Room, which includes an activity designed to familiarize students with Shakespeare’s language using his sonnets: we’d use both with all our students if we were still in the classroom.

Final Thoughts

Creating a Macbeth unit plan for different levels isn’t about lowering standards; instead, it’s about strategic scaffolding that meets students where they are while maintaining intellectual rigor. Macbeth is challenging for everyone—students AND teachers—but it’s worth it because the story, themes, and analytical opportunities are so rich.

Whatever level you teach, the core elements remain the same: supports that help students access the story, opportunities for analytical writing practice, and thematic engagement. The difference is in how much scaffolding you provide, not in the intellectual work you’re asking students to do.

We haven’t created comprehensive Macbeth materials yet, but we’re exploring whether this is a unit teachers need support with. If you’re teaching (or considering) a Macbeth unit plan, we’d love to hear from you—email us at [email protected] or connect on Instagram @threeheads.works.