SHAKER LIFE | SPRING 2014 59
“It was this hot August afternoon
in 2007 and we were sitting here talking
about Laurel’s legacy of scholarly
research,” recalls Klotz. The school’s
founder, Jennie Prentiss, studied with
the philosopher and progressive educator
John Dewey. In the 1980s, Carol Gilligan,
a prominent researcher and author of
the seminal In a Different Voice, spent six
years studying the girls at Laurel. JoAnn
Deak, author of How Girls Thrive and
other books about girls, served as director
of K-8 at Laurel for many years.
“We said, ‘Let’s reclaim this,’” says
Klotz, who also lives in Shaker. “We knew
that there was lots of interesting scholarly
research languishing on the shelves and
we wanted to build a bridge between that
work and our day-to-day work with the
girls here at Laurel.”
Seven years on, CRG has built many
bridges, which are evident throughout
the school. Take, for example, the
plethora of academic research on why
girls are underrepresented in STEM
fields, such as computer science. “We
looked at that research and found that
there are actually very few cognitive
gaps between girls and boys, except in
the areas of mechanical reasoning and
spatial skills,” explains Damour. “But
those gaps seem to play a major role.”
CRG’s answer: Get girls to tinker,
which research shows is useful in building
those particular skills. Laurel now has
three tinkering stations, one for each
division, where girls can spend their
free time playing around with a variety
of colorful building materials. “We were
surprised and delighted to find that we
can put the same materials in all three
divisions,” says Damour. “The older girls
are just as happy to work with the same
materials as the younger girls.”
Above photos, Roger Mastroianni
Top: Primary students Sonia Pinault and
Caroline Bifulco.
Middle: Shaker resident Mallory Orr, Ria
Desai, Middle School science teacher
Karen Morse, and Aliyah Anderson during
a robotics lesson.
Bottom: Kaitlyn Gocan, Shaker resident
Nicole Preucil, Shaker resident Daniela
Plana Trajtenberg, and Olivia Anastasi build
a model in a Middle School science class.