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Course Overview
Honors English III is a course based on the exploration of American Literature. While studying various literary genres (such as poetry, short stories, essays, novels, art, music, and plays), students will explore themes of personal identity, the effect of the environment upon an individual, and the diversity of what it means to be an American. Students will better understand literary and rhetorical analysis through a historical examination of literary movements through an array of American short stories. The major focus of writing is the development of multi-paragraph essays based on student-generated thesis statements. In addition, each student will be responsible for independently researching and presenting the work of a prominent contemporary American figure whose written or performed works have shaped American identity and/or culture. Because this course involves in-depth exploration and discussion, students must be self-motivated workers who are independent thinkers and readers. Outside reading books will be assigned throughout the year.
About Our Curriculum
The curriculum for each English course is continually reviewed and revised to ensure every student receives an engaging, rigorous learning experience aligned with the Massachusetts Curriculum Framework for English Language Arts and Literacy.
Course teams meet regularly to review student learning and make informed adjustments to curriculum and instruction to meet their students' unique needs and strengths. While teachers collaborate to establish shared learning experiences with core content, essential skills, and common outcomes within each course, we also intentionally preserve flexibility for teachers to tailor select texts, assignments, and learning experiences and to adjust unit sequencing or instructional approaches as appropriate.
For this reason, the unit overviews on this site represent the course's shared learning goals and experiences; specific texts, assignments, and sequencing may vary by teacher and class section. Please check your teacher's Schoology page regularly for the most current information about your student's class, including upcoming novel and media selections.
Thank you!
Ms. Crystal Laliberte, MA, CAGS
English Curriculum Coordinator, Grades 6–12
The American Short Story
Learning Targets
Learning Targets
By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:
Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to develop interpretations of complex American literature, including ideas that may be ambiguous or open to interpretation.
Analyze how authors’ choices regarding plot, characterization, setting, point of view, conflict, symbolism, imagery, irony, mood, tone, and structure contribute to meaning and style.
Analyze multiple themes or central ideas and how they develop and interact within and across texts.
Identify characteristics of major American literary movements—including Indigenous traditions, Romanticism and Gothicism, Naturalism, Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism—and analyze literature within its historical and cultural context.
Compare and synthesize works by diverse American writers to examine how literature constructs, reflects, and complicates ideas about American identity.
Develop thesis-driven literary analysis and original short fiction that demonstrate purposeful use of evidence, reasoning, organization, style, and literary techniques.
Essential Questions
Essential Questions
What are the key literary movements in American literature?
What does it mean to be “American”?
What are the diverse voices and experiences that make up the American identity?
How do historical and cultural contexts both shape and reflect the content and form of short fiction?
How does the environment shape an individual’s identity? An author’s work?
Instructional Snapshot
Instructional Snapshot
To meet the learning targets, students will:
Read complex short fiction and poetry representing diverse American voices, historical periods, and literary movements.
Closely analyze elements including plot, characterization, setting, point of view, symbolism, imagery, irony, conflict, mood, tone, and theme.
Examine how literary movements emerge from and respond to historical, cultural, artistic, and social contexts.
Compare texts across periods and perspectives to investigate changing and competing constructions of American identity.
Write frequently in response to literature and develop thesis-driven literary analysis supported by strong textual evidence and sustained reasoning.
Create an original short story modeled on the techniques, conventions, or style of a studied author or literary movement.
America's Developing Identity
Learning Targets
Learning Targets
By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:
Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to analyze characterization, conflict, theme, power, motivation, and moral decision-making in a dramatic text.
Analyze how literature reflects and critiques changing American ideas about religion, morality, conformity, fear, persecution, and individual responsibility.
Analyze irony, rhetoric, characterization, structure, and other authorial choices and explain how they contribute to meaning and social commentary.
Apply concepts such as mass hysteria, scapegoating, mob behavior, persuasion, logical fallacies, and power struggles to literary and historical analysis.
Synthesize literary, historical, and multimedia sources to examine connections among the Salem witch trials, McCarthyism, and broader patterns of collective behavior.
Develop analytical, personal, and creative writing that demonstrates purposeful use of evidence, organization, style, voice, and revision.
Essential Questions
Essential Questions
How does our environment affect our identity and our culture, literature, and arts?
To what extent has the role of religion and society's definition of morality changed throughout history?
What, if any, remnants of Puritan thought still appear to influence our modern lives?
How do hypocrisy and irony reveal human frailties and flaws through literature?
How does collective fear develop and impact communities and individuals?
To what extent is personal integrity more important than survival?
Instructional Snapshot
Instructional Snapshot
To meet the learning targets, students will:
Read and closely analyze The Crucible within its historical, cultural, and political contexts.
Examine how the play develops ideas about fear, morality, persecution, conformity, power, integrity, and individual responsibility.
Analyze characterization, irony, rhetoric, dramatic structure, persuasion, logical fallacies, mass hysteria, and scapegoating.
Connect the play with the Salem witch trials, McCarthyism, and other examples of collective fear, persecution, and power.
Participate in close-reading, collaborative discussion, performance, and analytical activities requiring textual evidence and interpretive reasoning.
Produce thesis-driven literary analysis and other writing that develops voice, style, audience awareness, and control of evidence.
The American Self: Nature & Reform
Learning Targets
Learning Targets
By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:
Define and explain major tenets of Transcendentalism, including self-reliance, individualism, the divinity of nature, conscience, and the role of the individual in society.
Analyze how Transcendentalist writers use rhetorical devices, imagery, diction, figurative language, repetition, and other stylistic choices to advance philosophical ideas.
Evaluate the role of Transcendentalism in shaping nineteenth-century literary, social, and political reform movements, including Abolition and Women’s Rights.
Connect nineteenth-century Transcendental ideas to contemporary perspectives on individuality, community, institutions, and social reform.
Apply ideas from primary texts to identify and analyze a current institutional or community issue and develop evidence-based proposals for improvement.
Collaboratively communicate interpretations and solutions through discussion, oral presentation, visual media, direct textual evidence, and purposeful digital tools.
Essential Questions
Essential Questions
What are the major tenets and characteristics of transcendentalism?
How did the transcendental tenets shape, inspire, and promote literary, social, and political movements and reforms?
How has transcendentalism impacted the way we perceive individuality today and the role of the individual in society?
How has transcendentalism impacted the way we engage in social reform today, and how can we utilize transcendental tenets and methods to participate in and enable social reform?
Instructional Snapshot
Instructional Snapshot
To meet the learning targets, students will:
Read and closely analyze primary Transcendentalist texts, recording and applying rhetorical definitions and analysis.
Examine how self-reliance, individualism, nature, conscience, and reform function as both philosophical ideas and literary themes.
Investigate nineteenth-century social reform movements influenced by Transcendentalist thought, including Abolition and Women’s Rights.
Participate in Socratic Seminar and other collaborative discussions requiring direct textual evidence, interpretive questioning, and engagement with competing ideas.
Design and lead an interactive group activity that introduces a social movement or reform issue and connects it to Transcendentalist ideas.
Create a collaborative social-reform presentation that applies Transcendentalist texts to a current school or community issue, proposes specific improvements, and communicates those solutions through direct evidence and professional visual media.
A Modern American Identity Emerges
Learning Targets
Learning Targets
By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:
Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support interpretations of complex characters, relationships, symbols, conflicts, and themes.
Analyze multiple themes—including the American Dream, social mobility, wealth, morality, identity, opportunity, and disillusionment—and how they develop and interact.
Analyze how Fitzgerald’s choices regarding characterization, setting, narration, symbolism, imagery, structure, and language contribute to meaning and aesthetic impact.
Identify characteristics of Modernist literature and analyze how literary works reflect, challenge, or respond to their historical and cultural contexts.
Read and engage with literary criticism to deepen, complicate, or challenge interpretations of a literary work.
Develop concise, stylistically controlled literary analysis and creative writing through purposeful claims, close reading, evidence, organization, language, and revision.
Essential Questions
Essential Questions
How has American literature explored what it means to be American throughout different time periods?
How do writers reflect diverse experiences with respect to social mobility, freedom of opportunity, and the American Dream?
How does an environment (historical, social, and cultural contexts) shape an individual’s identity?
How do writers reflect upon the changing relationship between the natural environment and American identity?
How do writers reflect upon the impact of advancements in industry and technology on American identity and the American Dream?
Instructional Snapshot
Instructional Snapshot
To meet the learning targets, students will:
Read and closely analyze The Great Gatsby alongside Modernist poetry, historical context, and selected literary criticism.
Trace themes involving the American Dream, class, opportunity, wealth, identity, morality, cultural conflict, and disillusionment.
Analyze symbolism, characterization, narration, imagery, structure, theme, and authorial intent through sustained close reading.
Examine how Modernist writers respond to social and cultural changes and how literature both reflects and critiques its historical moment.
Read and discuss literary criticism, comparing critical interpretations with students’ own evidence-based readings of the novel.
Develop thesis-driven literary analysis with increased attention to concision and style, participate in Socratic Seminar, and experiment with original poetry.
Homegoing
Learning Targets
Learning Targets
By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:
Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to develop precise interpretations of a complex, multigenerational American novel.
Analyze how multiple themes—including identity, freedom, inheritance, trauma, memory, family, power, and home—develop, interact, and build upon one another.
Analyze how narrative perspective, structure, interconnected characters, settings, and historical periods contribute to a work’s overall meaning.
Compare characters and generations to explain how ancestry, family history, social systems, and historical forces shape individual identities.
Trace significant symbols and motifs and analyze how diction, imagery, figurative language, repetition, and other stylistic choices develop meaning.
Develop precise literary claims supported by strong textual evidence, close analysis of language, and relevant historical and cultural context.
Essential Questions
Essential Questions
Who "owns" a story?
What does it mean to be “American” and to have “freedom,” and how have these understandings changed over time?
How do writers reflect diverse experiences of being American, with respect to social mobility, freedom of opportunity, and the American Dream?
How do contemporary writers manipulate narrative perspective and structure to create meaning?
What influence does the past-- specifically, ancestry and history-- have on identity?
Instructional Snapshot
Instructional Snapshot
To meet the learning targets, students will:
Read and closely analyze Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, tracing interconnected characters, family lines, settings, and historical periods.
Examine how shifting narrative perspectives and the novel’s multigenerational structure connect individual lives, historical events, and larger themes.
Trace interacting themes involving freedom, captivity, identity, inheritance, trauma, memory, family, storytelling, power, and home.
Compare characters across generations to analyze how ancestry, historical forces, social systems, and different forms of freedom and constraint shape identity.
Analyze recurring symbols, motifs, diction, imagery, figurative language, and other stylistic choices while integrating relevant historical context with close textual analysis.
Demonstrate understanding through literary analysis and the “What’s in a Name” assignment, using textual evidence to develop interpretations of identity, inheritance, and meaning.
American Voices: Art & Identity
Learning Targets
Learning Targets
By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:
Develop and refine a focused research question about a contemporary American figure whose writing or performance has shaped, challenged, or reflected American identity and culture.
Closely analyze primary works for language, imagery, tone, structure, style, voice, syntax, diction, theme, and literary or rhetorical choices.
Locate and evaluate authoritative print, database, digital, multimedia, and literary-critical sources for relevance, credibility, strengths, and limitations.
Analyze how biographical, historical, and cultural contexts influence a figure’s work without allowing contextual information to replace close analysis.
Synthesize evidence from primary and secondary sources to develop an original, debatable thesis about the figure’s relationship to American identity or culture.
Plan, draft, revise, document, and polish a sustained research argument using integrated quotations and paraphrases, MLA citation, precise academic language, and effective organization.
Essential Questions
Essential Questions
How do poets and musicians shape, challenge, and reflect American identity and culture?
How can poetry, music, and performance reveal the values, conflicts, contradictions, and experiences of American life?
How does an artist’s historical, cultural, or biographical context influence the subjects, themes, and style of their work?
How do writers and musicians use language, imagery, tone, structure, rhythm, and other artistic choices to communicate meaning?
How can close analysis of primary sources help us understand a figure’s larger impact on American identity and culture?
How can secondary sources deepen, complicate, or challenge our own interpretations of an artist’s work?
What makes a research claim specific, debatable, and significant?
Instructional Snapshot
Instructional Snapshot
To meet the learning targets, students will:
Select and independently investigate a contemporary American figure whose written or performed work provides a meaningful lens for examining American identity and culture.
Analyze primary sources while researching relevant biographical, historical, cultural, and artistic contexts.
Conduct research using databases, digital and multimedia resources, literary criticism, and other credible secondary sources.
Develop a focused research question and thesis, synthesize evidence across multiple sources, and distinguish contextual information from original analysis.
Practice purposeful integration of quotations and paraphrases, source documentation, MLA conventions, voice, syntax, diction, and formal academic style.
Move through research notes, outlining, drafting, peer review, revision, and editing to produce a polished MLA-formatted research paper with a Works Cited page.
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