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David Perkins

Professor David Perkins

Faculty Info

Professor of Education, Emeritus

Degrees

Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (1970)

Vitae/CV

david-perkins-4.pdf
Professor David Perkins

Email

David_perkins@harvard.edu

Office

Longfellow 425

David Perkins is a founding member of Harvard Project Zero, a basic research project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education investigating human symbolic capacities and their development. For many years, he served as co-director, and is now senior co-director and a member of the steering committee. Perkins conducts research on creativity in the arts and sciences, informal reasoning, problem solving, understanding, individual and organizational learning, and the teaching of thinking skills. He has participated in curriculum projects addressing thinking, understanding, and learning in Colombia, Israel, Venezuela, South Africa, Sweden, Holland, Australia, and the United States. He is actively involved in school change. Perkins was one of the principal developers of WIDE World, a distance learning model practitioners now embedded in programs at HGSE. He is the author of numerous publications, including fourteen authored or co-authored books. His books include; The Eureka Effect, about creativity; King Arthurs Round Table, about organizational intelligence and learning; Making Learning Whole, a general framework for deepening education at all levels; and Future Wise, about what's worth teaching for the contemporary era.

  • Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching can Transform Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass)
  • Learning at Work: Research Lessons on Leading Learning in the Workplace (Wilson, D., Perkins, D., Bonnet, D., Miani, C., Unger, C., Cambridge, MA: Harvard Project Zero)
  • King Arthur’s Round Table: How Collaborative Conversations Create Smart Organizations (NY: Wiley)
  • Archimedes’ Bathtub: The Art and Logic of Breakthrough Thinking (New York: W. W. Norton)
  • The Thinking Classroom: Learning and Teaching in a Culture of Thinking (Tishman, S., Perkins, D. N., & Jay, E., 1995. Needham, MA: Allyn & Bacon)
  • Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence (The Free Press)
  • Software Goes to School: Teaching for Understanding with New Technologies (Perkins, D. N., Schwartz, J.L., West, M., & Wiske, M. S., Eds. NY: Oxford University Press.)
  • The Intelligent Eye: Learning to Think by Looking at Art (The Getty Center for Education in the Arts)
  • Smart Schools: From Training Memories to Educating Minds (The Free Press)
  • The Inventive Mind: Creativity in Technology (Weber, R. & Perkins, D. N., Eds., 1992. NY: Oxford University Press.)
  • Informal Reasoning and Education (Voss, J., Perkins, D. N., & Segal, J. W., Eds. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.)
  • Block--Getting Out of Your Own Way: The New Psychology of Counterintentional Behavior in Everyday Life (Lipson, A., & Perkins, D. N. New York: Lyle Stuart Press)
  • Teaching Thinking: Issues and Approaches (Swartz, R., & Perkins, D. N. Pacific Grove, CA: Midwest Publications.)
  • Art, Mind, and Education (Gardner, H., & Perkins, D. N., Eds. Urbana-Champaign and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.)
  • A Practitioner's Series on Teaching Thinking (Swartz, R., & Perkins, D. N., Eds. Pacific Grove, CA: Midwest Publishers.)
  • Thinking: The Second International Conference (Perkins, D. N., Lochhead, J., & Bishop, J., Eds., 1987. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.)
  • The Teaching of Thinking (Nickerson, R., Perkins, D. N., & Smith, E., 1986. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum)
  • Knowledge as Design (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.)
  • The Mind's Best Work (Harvard University Press)
  • The Arts and Cognition (Perkins, D. N., & Leondar, B., Eds. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press.)

  • Cultures of Thinking
  • The WIDE World Initiative (Wide Scale Interactive Development for Educators)
  • LILA (Learning Innovations Laboratory), an inquiry project and four-times-yearly forum process for corporate and government representatives (2001-present)

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