English 11 (True Crime)

Course Overview

This one-semester course, intended for 11th grade students, will hone students’ reading, writing, and research skills, as they work toward their capstone project, a "mock-trial-style" closing argument. This course focuses specifically on building good writing skills: citing sources, analysing, paraphrasing, and editing and honing the paragraphs of an essay.

This course is skill-based. It will not focus on memorizing names of authors or characters; neither will it primarily test students on the recall of plot details. Instead, it will satisfy the Indiana ELA learning standards for grades 11-12

The course is designed to help you develop your writing, critical thinking and reading skills. Assignments include reading, writing, and researching; independent and collaborative work; and low-stakes and high-stakes writing assignments and exams.

Organized to allow a flexible schedule, pacing guidelines and suggested benchmarks are provided to help students maximize their learning and earn their course credit in a timely way. Students can expect to interact with peers as well as to receive regular constructive feedback from their teachers. The course provides learning experiences focused on Indiana state literature and composition standards. 

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to interact with fiction and nonfiction in the following ways: Students analyze the author's technique, purpose, and perspective in grade-level fiction and nonfiction text, using textual evidence to support analysis.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to produce written texts that do the following: Students compose writing and presentations for various genres which demonstrate a command of English grammar and usage through the writing and research processes; compositions will include correct use of standard formatting (e.g., MLA, APA) with sources correctly cited.

This course is designed for high-school juniors.
Please note that Cooperative courses are restricted to teen-age students only; you must be under 19½ at the time of registration.

View a demo version of the course at https://iu.instructure.com/courses/2311917

Prerequisite

English 10, or second-year English equivalent.

Required Materials

In this class, we will not use a textbook. All texts will be provided in online form through an online social annotation site called Perusall; there is no need to acquire a physical copy of any book.