Biographical Sketch of Linda B. Nilson

 
Linda B. Nilson is founding Director of Clemson University's Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation. She came from Vanderbilt University, where she directed the Center for Teaching for five and a half years. In addition to managing OTEI and its staff, she holds individual consultations with faculty, consults on instructional and assessment issues to committees and departments, and designs and conducts faculty development workshops at Clemson and other universities across the country. Her workshop repertoire includes comprehensive course design, interpretation of student evaluations, peer assessment of teaching for promotion and tenure, learning styles, case study design and debriefing, cooperative learning, and discussion management. Earlier this year, Anker Publishing put out her book, Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, which is the most up-to-date and comprehensive teaching methods book on the market.

 Before going to Vanderbilt, she directed the Teaching Assistant Development Program at the University of California, Riverside, and designed and taught a very popular graduate seminar on college teaching. In addition, she developed the "disciplinary cluster" approach to training TAs, a cost-effective way for a centralized unit to provide disciplinary-relevant instructional training. This approach received coverage in The Chronicle of Higher Education. She similarly structured TA training at Vanderbilt.
 
Dr. Nilson just completed a three-year term as chair of the Southern Regional Faculty and Instructional Development Consortium. She is also active on a national level in the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education.

Dr. Nilson entered the area of instructional and faculty development in the late 1970s while she was on the sociology faculty at UCLA. After distinguishing herself as an excellent instructor, her department selected her to establish its Teaching Assistant Training Program. She supervised it for four years.

In addition to her recent book, Dr. Nilson has written articles and presented sessions on critical thinking, college teaching journals, the academic job market, workshop planning and design, and the effects of gender on student evaluations of teaching. As a sociologist, she published research in the areas of occupations and work, social stratification, political sociology, and disaster behavior.

Dr. Nilson was a National Science Foundation Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she received her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in sociology. She completed her undergraduate work in three years at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.   Workshop Homepage   The CITE  Wayne State College