by the GATEway Gals
| Many teachers who work with advanced and gifted students create their own lessons and units, and some make them available for purchase. The GATEWay GALS are the first to write a guest blog post for BIG IDEAS for LITTLE SCHOLARS. In it, they share a little about their products and how they create them! |
Hi! We are Emily and Anna, The GATEWay Gals and we are so excited to have this opportunity to share with you! Between us, we have over three decades of teaching experience. Emily grew up in Alabama; Anna grew up in North Dakota, and we met when we both accepted positions as gifted educators in Tennessee! We both currently serve as gifted educators and instructional coaches for advanced academics in a large suburban district in Middle Tennessee, and we have been collaborating on curriculum and instruction for the last six years. We also enjoy co-teaching professional development sessions on topics such as depth and complexity, differentiation, curriculum design planning, best practice in gifted education, and identification programs. Our passion for providing the best for our gifted students has ignited a creative spark and led us to create over 125 resources with advanced and gifted learners in mind.
The longer we teach, the more we realize that finding comprehensive curricular materials that are challenging, engaging, and easy to implement can be a daunting task. As gifted educators and instructional coaches, we are tasked with finding rigorous and relevant resources for both gifted and general education groups. Gifted students simply need something different than other students in order to be respectfully challenged and continue to grow as learners, thinkers, and readers. Research shows that gifted learners require a curriculum that is global in scope, rigorous, and provides opportunities for depth and complexity.
Over the past five years, we have been creating units specifically targeted to meet the needs of our advanced learners. Each of our units is developed based on research-based frameworks, including Depth and Complexity, Content Imperatives, Jacob’s Ladder Reading Comprehension Program, Universal Themes, Socratic Inquiry Method, Creative Problem Solving, and others. Our students have blossomed using these units, often asking us to create new units of study in subject areas of interest. We are so excited to be able to share these units with others and hopefully get challenging and engaging materials into the hands of more gifted teachers in order to directly benefit more gifted students.
Our best-selling work is perennially our novel studies. These units feature high-level, complex, and abstract questioning and require students to really dig beyond the surface level. This builds an understanding of complex text structures, engages analysis and evaluation skills, and leads students to connect on deeper levels with texts. We find that teachers also love working through novel studies with their students, and get a great deal of satisfaction out of re-reading favorite books with a new purpose. Some of our best-selling (and favorite!) novel studies include Esperanza Rising, The One and Only Ivan, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Chasing Vermeer, and The Phantom Tollbooth.
Beyond novel studies, we have also been developing some broader units. These include many modalities for learning, including social-emotional learning, STEM tasks, multidisciplinary genre study, Creative Problem Solving, Socratic Seminar, and Universal Theme focuses, just to name a few. Most of these are based upon some sort of literature (Greek Mythology, Fairy Tales, Just So Stories, Fables, etc.) and work to build an advanced understanding of concepts around a common premise and scaffolded foundation. These units are fun for us to write, and our students love them! In fact, we enjoy writing them so much that these units tend to end blossoming in scope, finishing with a broad range of awesome connected materials, making them great for differentiation or incorporating choice! We have also been working on social studies units incorporating Depth and Complexity and primary sources to really dive into historical concepts.
We are passionate about making sure that gifted learners have the tools they need to be successful learners. In our eyes, a huge part of that is ensuring that they have respectful, challenging, and engaging learning materials. Creating these materials is so much fun for us, and we use every single thing that we create in our own classrooms. Gifted education is not an area in which most teachers have extensive training; we hope that the materials we create make it easy for all teachers to differentiate for the unique needs of these students.
Please visit our Instagram page (@gateway_gals) and our blog www.thegatewaygals.com to learn more about our materials and see what we’re doing in our classrooms. We’d also love to hear from you–email us at thegatewaygals@gmail.com to let us know how you’re using our materials and what you’d like to see from us next! Happy teaching!
Emily and Anna
The GATEWay Gals
