Linda Banks-Santilli is an associate professor of education at Wheelock College. Before joining the faculty at Wheelock, she taught at McLean Hospital in the department of psycho-education and was a Boston Public School teacher for over a decade.
Banks-Santilli received the Golden Apple Award from the Boston Public Schools in 1993 for her work with students in the Learning Adaptive Behavior (LAB) program, a program that served children with severe emotional and behavior problems. In 1997, she received the James Bryant Conant Fellowship from the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she earned her doctorate in 2003. Her thesis was a qualitative study aimed at understanding the school experiences of students in the LAB.
In 2001, she began teaching at Wheelock College and received promotion and tenure in 2007. At Wheelock, Banks-Santilli is a member of the Education faculty. She teaches a variety of methods courses to pre-service teachers and supervises student teachers in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge.
Banks-Santilli has served as Chair of her department and as Co-chair the Faculty Senate. She was involved in a 3-year study focused on urban teacher retention in 2006. In 2010, she received the Gordon Marshall Fellowship to conduct research on Wheelock College's first-generation college students.