Robert Swartz

He earned a PhD at Harvard University where he also did his undergraduate work, and is currently a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where he founded the graduate program for teachers on critical and creative thinking. He has worked around the worlds for over 25 years with teachers of infants-secondary school, university faculty, and whole schools and colleges, providing training programs on infusing critical and creative thinking into the content curriculum.

He has been a consultant for many years for the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the United States and has participated in numerous projects of curricular and educational innovation in various countries like Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Chile, and the USA, to mention just a few.

Robert Swartz is a member of the standing committee of the International Conference On Thinking.

Presentation

Art Costa and Robert Swartz

Traditionally, thinking and the emotions have been considered at odds with each other. In fact many have characterized this relationship as a struggle between the two, with, emotions the usual victor, to our great disadvantage.

Some more recent thinking about our emotions suggest otherwise. In this presentation we will advance some new ideas about this relationship, suggesting the possibility of a more natural and satisfying union of the two that stresses a more intimate relationship between thinking and our emotions as well as ways that we can metamanage our emotions – "metaemotional thinking". We will also describe examples in which these ideas have been put into practice in the classroom in attempts to teach students explicit thinking strategies that have an impact on their emotions.

KEYNOTE

Thinking-Based Learning: A Methodology for Transforming Learning Through the Infusion of Thinking Instruction into Content Instruction

In this keynote Dr. Swartz will describe a new methodology for classroom teaching that replaces the traditional teacher-centered methodology of rote learning that depends heavily on the use of direct memory by students as the primary basis of learning. This alternative involves active student-centered learning driven by the explicit use of strategies for skillful forms of analysis, creative thinking, and critical thinking, infused into content instruction, guided by metacognition, enhanced by the development of good thinking habits, and set in collaborative learning teams that contribute to full interactive classroom reflection. What results is that classrooms become active thinking classrooms, deeper and richer content learning results, and students develop life-long thinking skills that enrich their lives. Dr. Swartz will do this by showing and explaining classroom examples from many of the schools world-wide that are practicing TBL in classrooms for infants through the last years of secondary schools. He will also describe school-wide projects in which TBL is mapped into the school-wide curriculum within the school to make the whole school a Thinking-Based Learning School. This keynote will be an introduction to subsequent presentations by TBL schools and teachers showing how their mode of instruction has been transformed by TBL, and the results they have achieved.