Ron Ritchhart

There is no shortage of educational tools, frameworks, and innovations in the world today. My colleagues at Harvard Project Zero and I have produced a variety of potentially powerful tools over the years. These have been aimed at fostering understanding, engagement, creativity, agency, and the development of students as powerful thinkers and learners. The success of these tools depends on much more than their mere adoption and implementation, however. To use these tools and frameworks in truly transformative ways, educators must understand and embrace the underlying core beliefs and values behind them. What are their deeper motivations? What assumptions about learning, teaching, and the purpose of education are they built upon? This is the grounding that adds cohesiveness, flexibility, fidelity, and drive to our use of these tools and frameworks.

In this Keynote, we will explore the key mindsets we need if we are serious about creating powerful thinkers and learners. These mindsets emerge from over two decades of research and reveal the deep, structural foundation of Cultures of Thinking™. At the same time, these are not unique to Cultures of Thinking™ but are also key motivators, beliefs, and values of our work at Harvard Project Zero more broadly.

This session draws on work from my new book "Cultures of Thinking in Action."