Science Teacher Laura Woodcock’s love for the natural world stems from a childhood spent next to protected land in the company of llamas, chickens, miniature horses, cows, goats, and oxen.  “I would bring salamanders home from the woods and try to keep them as pets,” she recalls, adding, “As soon as I started to have some autonomy in my studies, I wanted to study nature, to learn more about it.”  After accumulating experience as a scientist, the desire arose to put her experiences to use, to impart the excitement of learning.

After earning a B.S. degree in Biological Sciences from Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts, Ms. Woodcock became a teacher at Nature’s Classroom, a New England nonprofit that hosts school groups for one week at a time of intensive science education and team building.  “I was inciting their curiosity,” she says, remembering teaching dissection and using yoga poses to teach human anatomy.  Her own curiosity has incited her to walk the Appalachian Trail, maintain the Penguin Colony of the New England Aquarium, and, when employed by the US Forest Service, to conduct occupancy surveys of Mexican Spotted Owls while night hiking in the mountains of New Mexico.  

Before coming to Green Hedges, Ms. Woodcock served as Environmental Representative for the Hult International Business School and as science teacher at Woodlawn School in North Carolina, where she led the school’s Environmental Stewardship Committee and guided students in botanical data collection and the creation of pollinator gardens, among other projects.  At Green Hedges she will be teaching Grades 4 and 5, and Middle School. “We stand on the shoulders of the teachers before us, and we find our own way,” she says, grateful for those who have inspired her over the years.