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David Perkins received his Ph.D. in mathematics and artificial intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. As a graduate student he also was a founding member of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This research and development group was initially concerned with the psychology and philosophy of education in the arts, and later broadened greatly to encompass cognitive development and cognitive skills in both humanistic and scientific domains. David Perkins was Co-director of Project Zero for more than 25 years and is now Senior Co-director and a member of the steering committee. He is a senior professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has conducted long-term programs of research and development in the areas of teaching and learning for understanding, creativity, problem-solving and reasoning in the arts, sciences, and everyday life. He has also studied the role of educational technologies in teaching and learning, and has designed learning structures and strategies in organizations to facilitate personal and organizational understanding and intelligence. These inquiries reflect a conception of mind that emphasizes the interlocking relationships among thinking, learning, and understanding. The three depend deeply on one another. Meaningful learning aims at understanding and depends on thinking with and about what one is learning. Effective thinking in the subject matters and in general involves understanding the resources of the mind and learning to deploy them sensitively and systematically. David Perkins' research on creativity resulted in the book, The Mind's Best Work (Harvard University Press, 1981), a well-received examination of the psychology of creativity. He is co-author with Raymond Nickerson and Edward Smith of The Teaching of Thinking (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1985), a book that reviews comprehensively the state of the art in teaching thinking. His Knowledge as Design was published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. in 1986. This book introduces a framework for making subject matter instruction more accessible and meaningful through an emphasis on reasoning and inventive thinking. He is co-author with Robert Swartz of Teaching Thinking: Issues and Approaches (Midwest Publications, 1989), a guide for practitioners. He is co-author with Abigail Lipson of Block--Getting Out of Your Own Way: The New Psychology of Counterintentional Behavior in Everyday Life (Lyle Stuart, 1990). His Smart Schools: From Training Memories to Educating Minds (The Free Press, 1992) brings together ideas and research from cognitive science and other disciplines to create a new vision of schooling. He is co-editor with Robert Weber of Inventive Minds (Oxford University Press, 1992), a collection of articles by contemporary inventors, historians of technology, and cognitive psychologists that discloses insights about the process of invention. His book The Intelligent Eye: Learning to Think by Looking at Art (The Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 1994), investigates how people can cultivate more thoughtful and insightful ways of looking at art. He is co-author with Shari Tishman and Eileen Jay of The Thinking Classroom: Learning and Teaching in a Culture of Thinking (Allyn and Bacon, 1995), a book about the teaching of thinking that focuses on creating a culture of thinking in the classroom. He is co-editor of Software Goes to School, a book about the role of technology in education (Oxford University Press, 1995). His Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence (The Free Press, 1995) explores how contemporary efforts to teach better thinking challenge the traditional concept of IQ. He has co-edited several other books. He returned to a book-length statement on creativity with the 2000 Archimedes’ Bathtub: The Art and Logic of Breakthrough Thinking (Norton), published in paperback as The Eureka Effect. His ideas about organizational development saw light in King Arthur’s Round Table: How Collaborative Conversations Create Smart Organizations (Wiley, 2003) and Learning at Work: Research Lessons on Leading Learning in the Workplace (Wilson, D., Perkins, D., Bonnet, D., Miani, C., Unger, C., Harvard Project Zero, Cambridge MA, 2005). In his research, David Perkins has focused on projects that involve a mix of basic research and the development of interventions. He participated in the design and testing of Odyssey, a course to teach thinking skills at the seventh grade level in Venezuela. Shown to be very effective, the course is published in an English language version by Charlesbridge Publishing of Watertown, Massachusetts. As an associate of the Educational Technology Center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he undertook research concerning the applications of technology to education. He and colleagues developed Thinking Connections (Addison Wesley, 1994), a program for integrating the teaching of thinking with subject matter instruction. He co-taught an interactive telecourse, Thinking to Learn, that helped teachers to integrate the teaching of thinking into their subject matter instruction. His current work, in collaboration with a number of colleagues, involves research and development projects on teaching and learning for thinking and understanding, including liaisons with groups in Venezuela, Israel, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Australia; LILA (Learning Innovations Laboratory), an initiative on learning organizations with members from the corporate world and government; and WIDE World, an online teacher development program. David Perkins has given many workshops and presentations regarding understanding, thinking, and education in a number of countries in Europe, Central and South America, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia, as well as Canada and the United States. He is a member of the standing committee for the International Conference on Thinking series. The 12th in the series was held in July, 2005, in Melbourne, Australia, and the 13th will occur in Norrkoping, Sweden, in June 2007. |
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