Intentional Creativity: An Evening with Harvard University’s Project Zero

Flossie Chua is a Principal Investigator at Project Zero, and her work focuses on understanding how people think about and experience complex ideas and challenges in different contexts, and how we can nurture good thinking and practices that develop not just better thinkers but also learners engaged by a range of topics, relating them to both individual and social needs and aspirations.

Her latest projects explore ways that (1) strategic and sustained engagement with artistic practice can create supportive conditions for individuals and communities to find personal and broader purpose in times of unprecedented uncertainty and challenge; (2) good ideas might be brought into action in the contexts of school leadership and student learning by understanding how entrenched beliefs create cognitive distortions and what we might do to avoid or correct them; and (3) catalyzing young people’s creative and civic capacities might prompt shifts in the way they see themselves in relation to others and in the way they apply creative impulses to civic challenges.

Flossie holds an Ed.D from Harvard University, and is also an instructor in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

David Perkins in 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. Perkins received his Ph.D. in mathematics and artificial intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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. 

Led by Flossie Chua, Project Zero

This session introduces participants to how strategic engagement with repair as an artistic practice can support individuals and communities in finding purpose in times of uncertainty and challenge. Participants will learn about transformative repair and experiment with how the idea of ​“repair” can open up possibilities for how they respond to damage in their own lives and their own communities.

Led by Cindy Foley, Director and CEO of GRAM

In this break-out, we will ask how we might intentionally develop and practice critical and creative thinking habits that include careful noticing, resisting assumptions, imagining, collaborative thinking, reasoning with evidence and perspective taking. Participants will learn the thinking routine ODIP (Observe, Describe, Interpret and Prove) that was specifically engineered to engage deep and reflective thinking skills.

Led by David Perkins, Project Zero

Initiatives to improve educational practice are common, but many changes fail to take hold or falter after two or three years. This session explores ​“ecologies of change,” and innovative research-based perspective on leading effective change.