Select two to four major texts to read. Novels such as "1984" by George Orwell, "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley or "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad are all challenging books for the twelfth grade. High school teachers also frequently select a Shakespeare play such as "Hamlet," "Othello" or "King Lear" for grade 12. Picking these books first is important because you will develop the rest of the course (major and minor assignments) around the themes, characters, structures and vocabulary in these books.
Read your chosen texts closely, noting themes and literary devices, highlighting challenging vocabulary and developing chapter questions as you go along. Research the authors' lives and the time period when they wrote the books. Find commonalities among the texts, such as tragic figures in "Hamlet" and "1984" or the descriptions of the "new worlds" in "Brave New World" and "Heart of Darkness." Weaving these themes into lessons and assignments throughout the term creates a sense of unity for your course.
Plan two to four major writing assignments. At least two of these should be essays, and at least one should require research. Other appropriate major assignments for grade 12 English include critical analyses, poetry, short stories or narrative essays. Type up an instruction sheet for each assignment that details the topic, length, format and any other requirements.
Pick a selection of smaller texts to study with your students, including poetry, short stories, newspaper articles and critical essays. Choose ones that relate to the major themes of the course, if possible. Use an anthology if you have one available to you; often these include study questions.
Decide on writing skills you want to teach your students. Introduce various writing formats to students such as essay writing, critical analyses writing, fiction writing and writing for the media. Cover advanced areas of grammar such as transitive and intransitive verbs, the subject and predicate of a sentence and types of phrases, as well as punctuation such as the comma, semi-colon and comma. At this level, many students struggle with such writing problems as comma splices, sentence fragments, parallelism and dangling modifiers. Create worksheets to address these areas.
Plan a schedule for the term. Decide when to begin reading each text, how many chapters or scenes to read each week and when assignments will be due. Create mini-assignments for the texts, such as study questions or vocabulary quizzes.
Prepare lessons, class work and homework for the first two weeks of the course. Try to keep one or two weeks ahead all term. Implement your plan the first day of class, making adjustments as you go along throughout the term. Modify assignments or lessons that seem ineffective; alter your grammar lessons to meet the needs of your students.
Create a final exam that tests the skills, concepts and knowledge you have studied over the semester. Quote-significance questions, character analyses, poetic interpretation and grammar questions are all appropriate for a final grade 12 English exam. Construct an exam essay question, related to one of the major themes studied, that requires students to compare two or more of the major texts of the course.