We’re kicking off a new 4-episode series called The Best Thing I Ever Taught. (If the name sounds like it’s inspired by The Best Thing I Ever Ate from the Food Network, it’s because it is!) Inside this series, we’ll be sharing all kinds of things that bring us joy and that we, and our students, have seen a huge return on. This week we’re focusing on gateway activities.

First, let’s define exactly what a gateway activity is. It has everything to do with what we do here at Brave New Teaching - essential questions and an inquiry-based curriculum design. More specifically, a gateway activity is the activity at the very beginning of a unit of study that gets your student buy-in. It introduces students to the topics being covered, and gets the chatter going about the essential question for the unit.

We are both sharing the details of the best gateway activities that we’ve each taught, one with a Gatsby unit and the other with a Shakespeare unit. This conversation will let you in on the process of planning these gateway activities, and hopefully you can see that there’s no set procedure for this. It takes brainstorming, and it gets a little messy, but that’s how the best ideas come to be!

If you have any questions after listening, we want to hear from you! Send us a message with questions or comments @bravenewteaching on Instagram. If you want more support with using gateway activities, we invite you to join us in Curriculum Rehab.

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