How to Actually Use an Anticipation Guide for The Great Gatsby Without Wasting Everyone's Time
An anticipation guide is a list of statement-based prompts designed to pull students into a text before they've even read it. You're not testing knowledge. You're pulling out assumptions. The Great Gatsby Anticipation Guide works because the novel is loaded with thorny social themes — class, ambition, moral decay, the American Dream — that students usually walk in with opinions about without realizing it. Start with 8 to 12 statements that touch on different angles of the novel. Don't make them plot-based. The whole point is to surface values and beliefs before the reading begins. Some of the better statements I've used over the years include things like "Money can buy happiness," "The past can be changed," "Being rich makes you a better person," and "Love and marriage are the same thing." Those last one always gets people talking, which is the whole point. Every statement needs to be something students can agree or disagree with, ideally with room for nuance. Avoid statements that are plainly factually wrong or so vague they don't mean anything. A statement like "Gatsby is a good guy" is too simple. Better: "Success is more important than loyalty." That one actually forces a choice.
I format the guide as a two-column table with columns for "Agree" and "Disagree," sometimes adding a third column for "Not Sure." Students mark their position, then write a brief justification in the margin. The writing part matters. Without it, you just get random checking and the discussion that follows becomes shallow.
Running the Activity in Practice
Here's how this actually plays out in a classroom, not the textbook version. Hand out the guide. Give students three minutes to fill it out individually. Then put them in pairs for five minutes to debate their choices. After that, open it up to the full group and go statement by statement. Let them defend their positions. You should expect pushback. Some students will argue the opposite of what you think they'll say, and that's fine. One thing I learned the hard way: don't reveal the answers. There aren't really answers here. I once had a student argue that Gatsby was selfish rather than romantic, and instead of redirecting her toward the "correct" reading, I let it go. The conversation that followed about moral ambiguity and narrative perspective was genuinely good. That would not have happened if I'd intervened to steer the discussion. After the discussion, have students revisit their original responses. If their opinion shifted, they note why. That reflection step is where the actual learning happens. Skipping it turns the exercise into a warm-up activity with no lasting impact.
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Common Mistakes I See
The biggest issue is when teachers make the statements too obvious or too aligned with the plot. If every question is about whether Gatsby loves Daisy or whether Nick is reliable, you're just doing a comprehension quiz disguised as an anticipation guide. The value is in the thematic provocation, not the plot recall. Another problem is going too fast. I've seen teachers rush through this in ten minutes because they're behind on coverage. That doesn't work. The discussion needs air. Let students sit with disagreement. The friction is the point. I also ran into a specific edge case once where the class was split along lines I hadn't anticipated. We were working through the statement about whether the American Dream is achievable, and the conversation turned into something much heavier than I'd planned. Some students brought in real personal experiences related to class mobility. I had to pivot quickly and keep the space open instead of yanking it back to literary analysis. The workaround was acknowledging that tension directly and letting the novel become the lens through which they processed their own views, rather than treating the guide as a contained classroom exercise.
What This Doesn't Do
An anticipation guide will not make students love the book. It will not replace close reading. It will not fix a class that has no time set aside for discussion. If you're trying to squeeze this into a five-minute transition between activities, skip it. The format requires actual time for student voice. When it works, it works well. When it's rushed, it feels like busywork and students know it. The guide also struggles with diverse classrooms where students have radically different life experiences that make certain statements feel irrelevant or loaded in ways the teacher didn't anticipate. In those situations, I sometimes add a statement like "Some of these questions might not apply to your life, and that's okay" at the top and allow students to opt out of specific prompts without penalty. That small adjustment prevents the activity from alienating students who don't see themselves reflected in the thematic assumptions built into the statements. If you want something simpler for a quick check-in before reading, a KWL chart or a single discussion question might be more appropriate than a full anticipation guide. The format is useful but not universally applicable.
