Great Teaching Seminar Facilitator Biographies

Doug Dickston

Doug Dickston taught English at Mt. Hood Community College for the fifteen years prior to his retirement in 2005. During the last ten years of that period (and continuing to the present), Doug has been on the staff of Pacific Northwest Great Teachers Seminar meeting annually in the Columbia Gorge outside Portland. In a previous life, he taught both senior and junior high school in Oregon City for fifteen years, most of which he can no longer recall at all. He lives in West Linn, Oregon and has been married to the same lucky woman for 35 years. Together they have produced 1 1/2 grown children.

Jan Woodcock

Jan Woodcock has been the Director of the Pacific Northwest Great Teachers Seminar for the past ten years and has directed the Long Island Great Teachers Seminar in New York.   She has been a part of Great Teacher Seminars and trainings in Canada, North Carolina, Virginia, and Arkansas. 

She teaches human services and psychology at Umpqua Community College.  She has coordinated Title III Grant activities focusing on faculty development and implementation of instructional technology.  She is the president of the Oregon Chapter of American Association of Women in Community Colleges and co-director of the Oregon Institute for Leadership Development.

She’s shorter than Doug, and slightly more humble.  Although, rumor has it that she’s just faking that part. 

She describes her full time faculty position as a wonderful job where she gets to laugh a lot with her students, celebrate their many successes, and work with some very fine faculty on an incredibly beautiful campus. 

She moved to Roseburg from Cambridge Massachusetts after finishing her Master’s Degree at Harvard.  Although the rivers, forests, and people of rural southern Oregon have been very good to her, she rarely passes up opportunities to travel up I-5 and is really looking forward to working with her colleagues at Lane.