Midway through the semester, Lori Crews has stepped into the position of broadcast journalism and fundamentals of speech teacher. With 25 years of teaching experience under her belt, she has many new ideas for her classes that she is excited to implement.
Crews started off as an English teacher at PC West High School. Since then she has taught in many different schools around Oklahoma City, but this is her first time teaching in a private school. Midway through her teaching career she transitioned to teaching speech and debate and drama.
“When Southmoore opened in 2008, I went there and taught drama and stagecraft,” Crews said. “I started their speech and debate team and also their mock trial team. All of those were pretty successful. That’s actually when I got to know Mr. Young.”
Crews met drama teacher Brett Young while he was the speech and debate coach at Westmoore High School, and they became close friends. Young was the one to encourage Crews to take the position at McGuinness, as it would be an opportunity to work together again.
“The job came up and Mr. Young and I talked, and we were like we think this is where I’m supposed to be,” Crews said. “I think this is where God wants me to be.”
Crews is excited for the opportunity to work alongside Young to coach the speech and debate team. She has three of the fundamentals of speech classes this year.
“I love all of the phases of coaching, but I really love these beginning pieces,” Crews said. “I love getting to see students at the beginning just starting out in the activity and helping them find their footing and find their voice. It really gives them the opportunity to find out who they are, and I love getting to be on the ground floor breaking into that.”
Crews also teaches video production and broadcasting. She has several ideas she is ready to implement once she is more settled in.
“I’ve heard a lot about Clancy’s Corner, and everybody, including the students, teachers, principal, seem to be very interested in us reimplementing Clancy’s Corner, so we’re going to do that,” Crew said.
Crews is also planning on starting a short film with the help from other groups and courses.
“We’re going to have two major types of projects going, one would be broadcast journalism like Clancy’s Corner, and the other aspect will be a creative film project,” Crews said. “We might partner with creative writing at some point to help with the script, and then partner with the actors to be part of filming. The students seem very excited about doing a short film.”
