This page lists what we actually have for Edexcel GCSE Drama 1DR0. It is built from the live activities, so it is accurate on the day you read it.
The rules a student can breach
Drama marks are lost in two quite different ways. A performance can be weak, which is a teaching problem and a rehearsal problem. Or a piece of coursework can break a rule, which is neither, and costs marks that had nothing to do with the quality of the work.
The second kind is entirely revisable, and it is where these activities are most useful.
The rules have numbers in them. The live theatre notes carry a word allowance. The devising portfolio has a word band with a floor and a ceiling. Performance timings sit in bands that change depending on how many performers are involved, so a duologue and a group of four are held to different lengths. The text a Component 2 performance is drawn from has to reach a minimum length, and the two pieces have to contrast.
Four of the eleven activities put those figures in front of students and make them work with them: how many words to cut, what the gap between a minimum and a maximum actually is, which choice satisfies the contrast requirement. Confirm the current figures against the specification before you rely on them, as with anything a board can revise, but the point is that this is knowledge, and knowledge can be tested in advance rather than discovered in moderation.
What the eleven cover
- Shared knowledge and terminology, two activities. These apply to the written paper whatever set text you teach, because the production vocabulary does not change with the play.
- The set text, three, all on DNA by Dennis Kelly: plot and characters, original context and themes, and the shape of the five-part exam question.
- Live theatre evaluation, two, on the evaluation framework and on choosing a production and taking notes within the allowance.
- Devising, three, on choosing stimuli, structuring the portfolio and the timing rules.
- Performance from text, one, on the contrast rule and text choice.
The live theatre problem
Section B asks a student to evaluate a live production, and that production is one your department chose and your students watched on a particular evening. It exists in their notes and nowhere else.
No resource can revise it for them, ours included. What can be prepared is the framework they will apply to it and the discipline of taking notes that are usable months later within a fixed allowance. That is what the two activities do, and it is worth doing early, because notes taken without knowing what the question will want are usually the wrong notes.
Using them
The lists below group by classroom use, worked out from what each activity contains. The activities themselves, with the recall goal spelled out, are described in ready-to-run revision activities, and since much of a Drama student's written preparation happens on their own, independent revision students actually keep doing is the closer fit.
Art and Design sits in similar territory, a course whose real work cannot be revised from a screen: Edexcel GCSE Art and Design. Its answer is different from this one, because Art's marks go missing in the portfolio rather than in a rule.
To put several in front of one class in order, build a sprint. Everything else we have, by subject and board, is on the revision pages.
What this page does not do
It covers one set text. DNA only. Three of the eleven are unusable to a department teaching something else, and the other eight are unaffected.
It does not teach performing, and performing is two of the three components.
It cannot see your students' work. The activities explain what the rules are; whether a particular devised piece meets them is your judgement and the moderator's.
Eleven activities across a two-year course is a supplement, not a scheme of work. It does not track anything, so there is no completion list to check.