Explore our programs — offering exceptional academic preparation, opportunities for growth, and the tools to make an impact.
Find everything you need to apply for and finance your graduate education.
Stories, strategies, and actionable knowledge — putting HGSE's powerful ideas into practice.
With deep expertise that connects research, practice, and policy, HGSE faculty are leaders in the field.
Get to know our community — and all the ways to learn, collaborate, connect, develop your career, and build your network.
Faculty-led programs to deepen your impact and build your effectiveness as an educator and leader.
Access the premiere education subject library for Harvard University.
Access the Office of Student Affairs, the Office of the Registrar, Career Services, and other key resources.
Explore opportunities to grow, build connections, and create change.
Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is also the head of the Steering Committee of Harvard Project Zero. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship and a Fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1981 and 2000, respectively. In 1990, he was the first American to receive the University of Louisville's Grawemeyer Award in Education. He also won Howard Gardner, recipient of the Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award. In recognition of his contributions to both academic theory and public policy, he has received honorary degrees from thirty-one colleges and universities, including institutions in Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, South Korea, and Spain. He has twice been selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. In 2011, Gardner received the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences; in 2015, he was chosen as the recipient of the Brock International Prize in Education; and in 2020, he received the Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). He has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Education, and the London-based Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce.
The author of thirty books translated into thirty-two languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments (please see Multiple Intelligences Oasis). Since the middle 1990s, Gardner has directed The Good Project, a group of initiatives, founded in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon.
In 2020, Gardner’s memoir, A Synthesizing Mind was published by MIT Press. He also recently completed The Real World of College with Wendy Fischman, to be published by MIT Press in 2022. This book explores the results of their large-scale national study documenting how different groups think about the goals of college and the value of a course of study emphasizing liberal arts and sciences. He contributes to his personal blog regularly.
This project focuses on expanding and disseminating an intervention that prods college students to think and act beyond the self. It also seek to create a hub for similar approaches in higher education. The overarching goal is to help students become more aware of and sensitive to ethical dilemmas. As documented in the researchers national study of higher education, students routinely describe these issues in terms of how they are affected personally (the I), with little acknowledgement of how these issues affect others, or how the consequences of their own actions may affect a broader community (the we). This project seeks to move the needle on character and ethics from I to we in the personal and professional lives of young citizens. In a two-year pilot project supported by the Kern Family Foundation, the researchers developed and tested an intervention (hereafter referred to as Beyond the Self) with 150 students at four different colleges. The documentation provides evidence that the intervention helped students to reflect more deeply and more broadly on situations and decisions they face themselves, learn about in class, and observe on campus and beyond. To scale-up this work, this three-year project that has three major objectives: 1. To disseminate the approach to other institutionsto help others implement Beyond the Self with students. 2. To network with others engaged in similar work; 3. Drawing on the researchers decades of creating powerful syntheses in education, to collate their efforts with others across higher education and produce a coherent integrated account that will prove useful across higher education and perhaps beyond.
Two new books tell the story of the renowned psychologist's intellectual life
The prepared remarks of Convocation speaker Howard Gardner
Celebrated psychologist and originator of the theory of multiple intelligences will address HGSE graduates on May 22