Faculty Spotlights Getting to Know Laurel School’s Department Chairs
Amanda Love, Physical Education Department Chair For Amanda Love, who has been a teacher for 28 years (seven at Laurel!), her love for physical education (PE) was a result of the many sports she played growing up. “When other kids were going to summer camp, I went to sports camp and spent weeks playing basketball, soccer, and figure skating,” she recalled. Sports was a common theme for Ms. Love through middle and high school. In her senior year, she created and coached the school’s first 7th and 8th grade girls’ basketball team as her independent study. She then went on to play soccer at Georgetown’s School of Languages and Linguistics and later received her Masters in Curriculum Design in Physical Education. She has been teaching ever since! At Laurel, PE is required for Early Learners through Grade 8.
Kate Webb, English Department Chair Kate Webb has been at Laurel for eight years and brings 13 years of teaching experience to the table, teaching English in both Middle and Upper School. As English Department Chair, Ms. Webb ensures students across divisions learn to read, write, and think critically. “We read a variety of texts from a range of genres and classifications, and our program is designed so that students are asked to express their ideas clearly and creatively through writing, close reading, and speaking tasks,” she said. While there is some focus on textual analysis in the classroom, Laurel's English teachers also guide students in their writing of narratives, poems, fiction, and expository pieces. Feedback from teachers and peers is key to the learning process. “One of our goals is for students to be equipped with the tools and language needed to hold high-level, collegial conversations about their and others’ writing,” Ms. Webb continued. When it comes to LCRG research, many themes are incorporated into Laurel’s English curriculum. Ms. Webb remarked, “Teachers are not only intentional about including a variety of texts and voices into our curriculum, we are also thoughtful about how to facilitate meaningful—and sometimes uncomfortable— conversations that surface in classes. In this effort, the work coming out of LCRG has been key in Laurel’s efforts to provide students with tools for civil discourse.” English faculty also employ 12
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“While many of our units embrace traditional sports and games, the world of PE is changing and it is not what adults in our community may have experienced,” said Ms. Love. “Mixed in with some of these sports units are other units that focus on social and emotional learning (SEL), teamwork, kindness, and sportsmanship. We also focus on more lifelong activities like fitness, golf, flag football, cornhole, pickleball, badminton, biking, and new this year, archery.” Ms. Love says “Our department is unique in that we see kids over an extended number of years as they move through the divisions we teach. We focus a great deal on growth mindset—one of LCRG’s five pillars of resilience—starting with students in Early Childhood. In Kindergarten we ramp it up quite a bit and see ourselves as facilitators in our student’s journey. As students get older, we do a lot to infuse curriculum with activities and tenets of Project Adventure so that the foundations of growth mindset, challenge by choice, and self-care are touched on repeatedly”.
all parts of the learning cycle—preparation, practice, application, and reflection—in their work. Reflective work in particular allows student learning to be long-lasting and memorable; it also aligns with the LCRG-designed Ownership of Learning self-assessment tools, particularly as it relates to metacognition. Ms. Webb’s passion for English started at an early age when her parents (both teachers!) took her to the library every weekend and her grandparents instilled in her a love of reading. With teachers who challenged her to expand her writing with poems and narrative pieces, she ended up competing in Power of the Pen in middle school. A member of her high school Speech and Debate team, Ms. Webb competed in the United States Extemporaneous Speaking category, which required her to write 30-minute speeches on the spot. She loves passing along her love for writing to her Laurel students and takes great pride in coaching our award-winning interscholastic competitive writing team, JustWrite Ohio.
