12th Grade ELA Course Summary
Please Note: The Fishtank team is in 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 12th Grade ELA sequence centers around the theme On Being Human. Two new units for 12th Grade have been released for teachers who wish to pilot them in early 2025, and the three remaining units will be released in Summer 2025.
In 12th Grade English Language Arts, students explore enduring themes such as love, family, memory, and culture through powerful works of fiction from around the globe and across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries: Invisible Man, A Doll’s House, The God of Small Things, The Great Gatsby, thematically aligned Famous Speeches, and related multimedia materials. Students will spend time examining the techniques and styles of the various authors, analyzing how each author crafts his or her story and communicates his or her message, including a special emphasis on intertextuality and the authors' use of allusions to other great works of literature to deepen their own messages. Across the 5 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 longform whole class discussions including Socratic Seminars, and write multi-paragraph responses to Essential Questions by gathering evidence and effectively communicating their thoughts.