11th Grade ELA Course Summary
Please Note: The Fishtank team is beginning the process of revising the 11th and 12th Grade ELA courses to refine the sequence of unit texts and provide deeper, more aligned support for teachers and students. The full sequences for 11th and 12th Grade ELA will be available for the 2025-26 school year.
The new 11th Grade ELA sequence will center around the theme American Dreams and Realities. Two new units for 11th Grade will be released in January 2025 for teachers who wish to pilot them in early 2025.
- Unit 1: Transcendentalism
- Unit 2: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with excerpts from Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
In 11th Grade English Language Arts, students explore thematic questions related to racism, identity, colonialism, reality, and human nature through diverse, rigorous, and relevant texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: The Glass Menagerie, Things Fall Apart, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dreaming in Cuban, Waiting, The Scarlet Letter, and thematically aligned short stories and multimedia materials. Across the 7 units, students deepen their paragraph writing skills through narrative, opinion, analytical, and informational writing tasks.
Building upon the knowledge and English Language Arts skills they’ve developed in previous years, students deeply engage with complex texts through both independent reading and guided Close Reading, prepare for and engage in whole class discussions including Socratic Seminars, and write multi-paragraph responses to Essential Questions by gathering evidence and effectively communicating their thoughts.