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 critical thinking 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 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. He co-directed PZ for nearly 30 years, and now serves as a member of the executive committee. He continues involvement in projects at PZ as co-principal investigator and in other roles. Colleague Shari Tishman and he offer a podcast Thinkability concerning thinking and its development in education and beyond, with episodes released regularly since Fall 2021.    

He has authored and co-authored more than a dozen books about topics such as teaching and learning, what's worth learning, creative thinking, critical thinking, and organizational learning. For a sample, his most recent book, Sidewise: Unruly Rules of Thought and Action, concerns sidewise mindsets that make the best of challenges such as decision making, willpower, creativity, and more. Surfing on Quicksand: Navigating a World of Information, Opinion, and Spin addresses fundamental problems of truth and evidence in society. His Future Wise: Educating our Children for a Changing World offers a revisionary view of what’s truly worth teaching and learning for today and tomorrow. Making Learning Whole 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.