Judy Lightfoot, PhD

Biography
Email: judylightfoot@earthlink.net

An award-winning teacher, Dr. Judy Lightfoot taught English at Seattle’s Lakeside School for 25 years and for eight years at colleges, including four years at the University of Washington. She regularly served on panels reviewing education proposals at the National Endowment of the Humanities in Washington, D.C., and is an experienced user of computer technologies; as a member of the English Department at the University of Washington she taught computer-assisted courses in wired classrooms. She is the Founding Head of Eastside Preparatory School, an independent secondary school that opened near Seattle in 2003 and graduated its first class of seniors in 2009.

 

Dr. Lightfoot leads workshops for teachers at American and international schools on assessment in the humanities, on writing across the curriculum as a method of thinking and learning, on instructional strategies for student-centered classrooms, and on teaching the traditional academic subjects as “thinking tools” - as rewarding structures of intellectual inquiry. Her practice is founded on recent research by neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists into how people learn. Besides consulting with schools and mentoring teachers, Lightfoot coaches writers of poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction, and business communications.

 

Lightfoot’s articles and reviews appear in Crosscut and have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Seattle newspapers, and elsewhere. In 2000 she was honored for Excellence in Journalism by the Society of Professional Journalists and also received an award from the Seattle Arts Commission. Her poetry appeared in many publications, including A Millennium Reflection: Seattle Poets and Photographers (U.W. Press, 2000), and her chapbook of poems, Calling the Crow, was published by Brooding Heron Press in 1998. Lightfoot is fascinated by the resources and resistances of the English sentence and by the generative tensions between ordinary speech and the free verse line.

 
These days, besides writing for Crosscut Lightfoot spends much of her time as a Freestyle Volunteer, meeting weekly for coffee at cafés with individuals who share our public spaces but who are socially isolated by mental illness or homelessness. She is also a volunteer and board member at Plymouth Healing Communities and the University District Ecumenical Campus Coalition. She lives in Seattle with her husband and favorite critic, the poet Robert McNamara.

Lightfoot's Resume
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Page last updated 11/23/09