Our Commitment to Excellence
Highly qualified teachers, specialists, and therapists with graduate degrees and the necessary certifications in their respective areas of expertise come together at Gateway to transform the lives of students and their families. Every professional demonstrates:
- a love of teaching
- dedication to Gateway’s mission to teach students the skills, strategies, and content necessary for successful integration into mainstream classrooms
- the belief that each student can learn provided he or she receives appropriate and effective research-based instruction
To ensure a high standard of teaching for the benefit of every student, all faculty and therapists participate in an ongoing, intellectually challenging professional development program. Through required course participation, in-house lectures, workshops, individual coaching, and recurrent observations and evaluation, Gateway faculty and therapists acquire the knowledge and instructional skills required for successful remediation of a Gateway student’s reading, writing, math, or other learning disability. Run by Gateway’s Director of Language and Literacy, Heather Ironside, in collaboration with the consultant and staff developer, Lydia H. Soifer, Ph.D., and the program leadership, the primary areas of focus of Gateway’s professional development program are:
- direct, explicit, sequential, multisensory instruction
- the impact of language on how a student thinks, feels, and learns
- how to use language when teaching students with language-based learning disabilities, attention deficit, and other learning disabilities, in accordance with the Classroom Language Dynamics program
- diagnostic instruction and how it guides the individualization of instruction
- curriculum development, including unit and class planning, to strategically weave together skills, strategies, and content
At Gateway, teachers, specialists, and therapists participate in and contribute to a community of learners that reflects on its practice individually and as a group. Motivated daily by the wonder of each student’s accomplishments, Gateway’s professionals work hard and grow in knowledge and skill as they blend their classroom experiences with their weekly training. Through its professional development program, Gateway guarantees expert instruction for students with learning disabilities.
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