David Perkins, a founding member of Harvard's Project Zero, investigates human cognitive capacities and their development. His research explores creativity in arts and sciences, informal reasoning, problem-solving, and learning. Perkins has contributed to international initiatives aimed at enhancing thinking and understanding. His work seeks to deepen education at all levels and define what is worth teaching for the contemporary era.
Breakthrough thinking comes as a sudden, seemingly unaccountable moment of inspiration: From Archimedes' discovery in the bathtub of the principle of water displacement to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, from Brunelleschi's development of perspective drawing to the Impressionist revolution, from the taming of fire to the creation of the laser, it has shaped and advanced civilization.
Originally published in 1990, this title attempts to provide for the educational practitioner an overview of a field that responded in the 1980s to a major educational agenda. This innovative 'agenda' called for teaching students in ways that dramatically improved the quality of their thinking. Its context is a variety of changes in education that brought the explicit teaching of thinking to the consciousness of more and more teachers and administrators.