David Perkins

David Perkins is the Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Professor of Teaching and Learning Emeritus 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.

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 Harvard Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He co-directed Project Zero for nearly 30 years, and now serves as a member of the Project Zero Executive Committee. He is currently co-principal investigator of three projects – LILA (Learning Innovations Laboratory), concerned with organizational learning and development in business, government, educational and other organizations, Leading Learning that Matters, concerned with school leadership for change focused on what students learn and why, and Idea into Action, concerned with paradigms that foster innovation in teaching and learning and promote student learning that carries over into students' lives beyond school.

He has authored and co-authored more than a dozen books about topics such as teaching and learning, what's worth learning, creative and critical thinking, and organizational learning. For a sample, his most recent book, Surfing on Quicksand: Navigating a World of Information, Opinion, and Spin, has just become available on Amazon. His Future Wise: Educating our Children for a Changing World was published in 2014. His Making Learning Whole, 2008 shares an approach to organizing learning around full meaningful endeavors. He is the author of The Mind’s Best Work on creativity), The Eureka Effect on creativity, Smart Schools on pedagogy and school development, Outsmarting IQ on intelligence and its cultivation, Knowledge as Design on teaching and learning for understanding, The Intelligent Eye on learning to think through the arts, and King Arthur’s Round Table: How Collaborative Conversations Create Smart Organizations.