We Are All Teachers Now

Learning With The World’s Great Teachers

Preface

At some point in our lives, especially now in the Covid-19 era, we realize how we are all teachers, just as formerly we have all been students. In one manner or another we remain students all our lives, and, in some capacity, teachers as well—of family history, of local culture, of national and geo-politics, of religion, of business, of science, of sports, of human behavior, of a profession, of the arts, of the environment, of life itself in all its plenitude and variety.

You may instruct in a classroom or a boardroom, on a street or an athletic field, in an office, a conference room, a factory, a lab, at a kitchen or dining room table, on a family room couch—most likely in a number of these places. In various ways teaching and learning are happening every moment in actual and virtual spaces, and in hybrid venues. Teaching and learning never cease, though we may sometimes forget this fact. And so this project speaks to us all as teachers and learners in these varied domains, however formal or informal our teaching and learning may be, and however sporadically they may occur.

But just what do we mean by “teacher and “teaching?” As I have been suggesting, the concepts of teacher and teaching are protean; they assume many forms. A teacher is anyone who instructs another through example or experience, anyone who imparts knowledge, anyone who helps another develop a skill, talent, or capacity. A teacher helps others learn how to do things, from tying shoelaces to solving differential equations; from learning to walk and talk to riding a bike, flying a kite, cooking a meal, playing a musical instrument; navigating an app, drawing up a business plan; interpreting a chart, poem, or painting; preparing an architectural or engineering design; evaluating a proposal or a belief system; coaching a team, raising a child, loving a partner, figuring out how to live a fulfilling life.

Teaching is the process of assisting the act of learning—facilitating that learning through demonstrating and explaining, showing and telling, guiding and enabling. As teachers we are interventionists; we intervene strategically to listen and question, explain and illustrate, model and evaluate. Through these and other methods we facilitate learning.

At our best, our teaching influences and inspires. Our interventions can have profound effects that shape and change lives, as teachers’ interventions can endure for a lifetime.

The best kinds of teaching lead to more than any singular outcome; they lead, rather, to a broader set of skills, including, most importantly, learning how to do and make things; learning how to think for oneself.

Learning how to learn.

At their most successful, the best teachers enable those they teach to do without them, to no longer need them. The most effective teachers make themselves obsolete.

And so this work is for all who intervene in the lives of others, including professional educators—teachers, administrators, and other experts who have undergone training and, likely, certification; this work is for them, certainly. If you are a teacher or administrator; if you are a tutor, a mentor, a coach; a pundit, guru, or guide, this work is also for you.

But it’s not for you only. And it’s not for you in your professional capacity alone.

If you are a parent, this work is for you. As parents, we are our children’s first and often most influential teachers. In this time of the Covid-19 pandemic, parents have been thrust into teaching in new and more comprehensive ways, expanding their teaching roles. Parents have also had their responsibilities increased as decision makers for their children’s educational options, a role that has become unnervingly complex. Learning from great teachers and educational reformers can help all parents make better, more educationally sound decisions for their children. And for themselves, as well.

This work is for you, too, as a friend, because friends teach each other by word and by deed. Friends teach by example. And it’s for you, finally, as teacher of yourself, as a continuing provider of your own experiences in learning.

Each of us can learn from the world’s best teachers—past, present, and future. The most

important thing we learn from them may well be how to become better teachers and students ourselves, teachers of others and of ourselves, master teachers and master students both.

We teach as we are taught—as we have been taught. We become what our teachers make of us—all those teachers, ourselves included. Who teaches us, how we are taught, and what we learn from that teaching count immeasurably. They count because, to a large extent, we are what we learn and what we teach.

We become what we learn. We teach who we are.

And yet some of the teaching we may have endured was almost certainly bad teaching—inept teaching, ineffectual teaching, perhaps even immoral teaching. From our worst teachers we learn what not to do. From our best teachers, conversely, we learn both what to do and how. Our best teachers inspire as well as instruct; they encourage and motivate us. We learn from their ideas and their ideals, from their principles and their practices. We learn, too, from their character, from their lives, from their actions, from what they commit themselves to and what they stand for, as they teach by living example.

For these master teachers, I consider briefly why they taught—what motivated them—along with how they taught—their teaching methods and practices. I consider, too, something of what they taught, providing an exposition of key ideas and values, accompanied by brief excerpts from their sayings and writings.

Not all the work’s figures devoted their lives to teaching, though many did. Some were educational reformers with minimal teaching experience; others developed philosophical and psychological perspectives, created practical teaching strategies, or formulated curricular designs with implications for educational policy and instructional practice. Still others used multiple technologies—television, film, websites, print and digital magazines, video games, and more to reach audiences of millions, as have Tim Gunn, Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, Sal Khan, George Lucas, and John Madden, for example.

Every chapter concludes with considerations about teaching and learning inspired by the world’s best teachers. Most of those considerations summarize key teaching practices of the chapters’ subjects—Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, J. S. Bach and Zoltán Kodály, Suzanne K. Langer and Jerome S. Bruner, I. M. Pei and Maya Lin, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, to cite a few. Other chapters’ teaching and learning considerations either imitate great teachers (Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Luther, Bacon, Barton), or they appear as imaginary dialogues between them—Samuel Johnson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Paolo Freire, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, Ken Burns and Neil deGrasse Tyson, George Saunders and Mister Rogers, Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, among many others.

The teaching and learning considerations I offer reflect my educational ideas refracted through the lenses of the world’s great teachers. Throughout, ancient wisdom and modern pedagogical ideas coalesce in contemporary practice.

I have kept the chapters short; they provide a brief overview of paired teachers’ lives and work, with Socrates and Leonardo single-chapter exceptions—Socrates as the West’s first great teacher, Leonardo its supreme example of self-teaching. For each of the work’s figures, you are offered a taste of their teaching; collectively, the chapters provide a smorgasbord of appetizing morsels to sample and savor. Taken together as well—and to shift the metaphor—the chapters invite you on an educational journey through the centuries and across disciplines and cultures.

Whether you are sampling a self-selected set of chapters, reading a pre-selected series of chapters, or planning on reading the entire work, I hope We Are All Teachers Now brings you pleasure along with instruction, enjoyment with information, and occasional inspiration as well.

We begin our journey with Socrates.


PROSPECTIVE LIST OF CONTENTS

Dedication / Preface

BOOK I: Ancient World to Mid 19th Century

Chapter 1                                Socrates

Chapter 2                                Plato and Aristotle

Chapter 3                                Confucius and Sakyamuni (Buddha)

Chapter 4                                Moses and Maimonides

Chapter 5                                Homer and Virgil

Chapter 6                                Arete of Cyrene and Hypatia

Chapter 7                                Sappho and Cleopatra

Chapter 8                                Jesus and Paul

Chapter 9                                Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas

Chapter 10                              Mohammad and Averroes

Chapter 11                              Hildegard von Bingen and Christine de Pizan

Chapter 12                              Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer

Chapter 13                              Leonardo Da Vinci

Chapter 14                              Martin Luther and Ignatius of Loyola

Chapter 15                              Desiderius Erasmus and al-Ghazālī

Chapter 16                              Baldassare Castiglione and Niccolò Machiavelli

Chapter 17                              Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon

Chapter 18                              William Shakespeare and G. B. Shaw

Chapter 19                              John Amos Comenius and Horace Mann

Chapter 20                              Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton

Chapter 21                              Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and François Fénelon

Chapter 22                              John Locke and Immanuel Kant

Chapter 23                              Giambattista Vico and Denis Diderot

Chapter 24                              Johann Sebastian Bach and Zoltán Kodály

Chapter 25                              John Milton and Thomas Jefferson

Chapter 26                              Samuel Johnson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Chapter 27                              Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill

Chapter 28                              Mary Wollstonecraft and Emma Willard

Chapter 29                              Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel

Chapter 30                              Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton

Chapter 31                              Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass

Chapter 32                              Leonhard Euler, G. H. Hardy, Srinivasa Ramanujan

Chapter 33                              Jane Austen and William Wordsworth

Chapter 34                              Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

Chapter 35                              Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe

Chapter 36                              Elizabeth Peabody and Mary McLeod Bethune

BOOK II: Mid 19th to Late 20th Century

Chapter 37                              Elizabeth & Emily Blackwell and William Osler

Chapter 38                              Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Chapter 39                              Margaret Fuller and Jane Addams

Chapter 40                              Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche

Chapter 41                              Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy

Chapter 42                              Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein

Chapter 43                              John Henry Newman and William James

Chapter 44                              Walt Whitman and Robert Frost

Chapter 45                              Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois

Chapter 46                              Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan

Chapter 47                              Virginia Woolf and James Joyce

Chapter 48                              Nadia Boulanger and Andrés Segovia

Chapter 49                              John Dewey and Maria Montessori

Chapter 50                              Konstantin Stanislavsky and Uta Hagen

Chapter 51                              Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Paolo Freire

Chapter 52                              Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead

Chapter 53                              Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Chapter 54                              Rabindranath Tagore and Chinua Achebe

Chapter 55                              Gabriela Mistral and Jaime Escalante

Chapter 56                              Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson

Chapter 57                              Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

Chapter 58                              D. T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton

Chapter 59                              Martin Buber and Parker Palmer

Chapter 60                              J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis

Chapter 61                              Dorothea Lange and Frida Kahlo

Chapter 62                              Susanne K. Langer and Jerome S. Bruner

Chapter 63                              Lev Vygotsky and Ivan Ilich

Chapter 64                              Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler

Chapter 65                              Shinichi Suzuki and Dorothy DeLay

Chapter 66                              Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin

Chapter 67                              Agnes de Mille and George Balanchine

Chapter 68                              Gregory Bateson and Clifford Geertz

Chapter 69                              James Beard and Julia Child

Chapter 70                              Gwendolyn Brooks and Kenneth Koch

Chapter 71                              Tillie Olsen and Shirley Chisholm

Chapter 72                              Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu

BOOK III: Mid 20th Century to Early 21st Century

Chapter 73                              Franz Fanon and Hannah Arendt

Chapter 74                              Leontyne Price and Leonard Bernstein

Chapter 75                              Susan Sontag and Umberto Eco

Chapter 76                              George Orwell and Annie Dillard

Chapter 77                              Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston

Chapter 78                              Edward Said and bell hooks

Chapter 79                              Vince Lombardi and Phil Jackson

Chapter 80                              Neil Postman and Maxine Greene

Chapter 81                              Grace Hopper and Steve Jobs

Chapter 82                              Jacques d’Amboise and Twyla Tharp

Chapter 83                              Robert Shaw and John Eliot Gardiner

Chapter 84                              I. M. Pei and Maya Lin

Chapter 85                              Kenneth Burke and Ann E. Berthoff

Chapter 86                              Peter Drucker and Margaret Wheatley

Chapter 87                              Robert Scholes and Michael Sandel

Chapter 88                              Gregory Rabassa, Edith Grossman, Lydia Davis

Chapter 89                              Sir Ken Robinson and A. O. Scott

Chapter 90                              Vincent Scully and Rob Kapilow

Chapter 91                              Eliot Eisner and Sheridan Blau

Chapter 92                              Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia

Chapter 93                              George Saunders and Fred Rogers

Chapter 94                              E. H. Gombrich and Daniel Kahneman

Chapter 95                              Roger von Oech and Edward de Bono

Chapter 96                              Richard Feynman and Edward Tufte

Chapter 97                              Carl Sagan and Stuart Firestein

Chapter 98                              Mina Shaughnessy and Mike Rose

Chapter 99                              Theodore Hesburgh and Ruth Simmons

Chapter 100                            Harry Houdini and Ricky Jay

Chapter 101                            August Wilson and David Mamet

Chapter 102                            Robert W. Boynton and Robert Gottlieb

Chapter 103                            David Ogilvy and Jack Foster

Chapter 104                            Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber

Chapter 105                            A. S. Neill and Carl Rogers

Chapter 106                            Benjamin Bloom and Lawrence Cremin

Chapter 107                            Robert Maynard Hutchins and Roosevelt Montás

Chapter 108                            E. O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, Eric Mazur

BOOK IV: Early 21st Century

Chapter 109                            Richard Selzer and Paul Farmer

Chapter 110                            Timothy Gallwey and Brené Brown

Chapter 111                            Robert Frank and Dan Ariely

Chapter 112                            Henri Petroski and Jeanne Gang

Chapter 113                            Kwame Anthony Appiah and Jonathan Haidt

Chapter 114                            Ken Burns and Neil deGrasse Tyson

Chapter 115                            Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey

Chapter 116                            Yo-Yo Ma and Wynton Marsalis

Chapter 117                            Philippe de Montebello and Laurence des Cars

Chapter 118                            Brian Greene and Alan Lightman

Chapter 119                            Pat C. Hoy II and William V. Costanzo

Chapter 120                            Michael Hogan and Adrian Barlow

Chapter 121                            Alison Gopnik and Paul Bloom

Chapter 122                            Linda Darling-Hammond, Howard Gardner, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Chapter 123                            Adam Grant and Michael Michalko

Chapter 124                            Carol Dweck and Peter Johnston

Chapter 125                            Jill Lepore and Yuval Harari

Chapter 126                             Deborah Tannen and John McWhorter

Chapter 127                            Leon Kass and Martha Nussbaum

Chapter 128                            Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee

Chapter 129                            Sal Khan and George Lucas

Chapter 130                            Mary Beard and Garry Wills

Chapter 131                            Lani Guinier and Tim Wu

Chapter 132                            John Madden and Bob Costas

Chapter 133                            Fred Child, Naomi Lewin, Bruce Adolphe

Chapter 134                            Thomas Friedman and David Brooks

Chapter 135                            Bryan Stevenson and Saru Jayaraman

Chapter 136                            Frank Wilczek and Jennifer Doudna

Chapter 137                            John Holt and Hope Jahren

Chapter 138                            Cornel West and Steven Pinker

Chapter 139                            Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Hilary Mantel

Chapter 140                            Robert A. Caro and Doris Kearns Goodwin

Chapter 141                            Walter Isaacson and Richard Cohen

Chapter 142                            Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chapter 143                            Tim Gunn and Diane von Furstenberg

Chapter 144                            Sister Mary Clarence and Pete (Maverick) Mitchell

Chapter 145                            Edward S. DiYanni and Mary H. DiYanni

Coda: Teaching Credo

Epilogue: My Influential Teachers and Mentors

Acknowledgments

Index


 

CONTENTS BY SUBJECT

Philosophy and Religion

Socrates

Plato and Aristotle

Confucius and Sakyamuni

Arete of Cyrene and Hypatia

Moses and Maimonides

Erasmus and Ghazālī

Vico and Diderot

Locke and Kant

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

Sartre and de Beauvoir

Smith and Mill

Newman and James

Susanne K. Langer

John Dewey

Maxine Greene

Vygotsky and Illich

Burke and Berthoff

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Michael Sandel

Jesus and Paul

Muhammad and Averroes

Hildegard von Bingen

Augustine and Aquinas

Dante Alighieri

Luther and Ignatius

John Henry Newman

Martin Buber

T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton

Desmond Tutu

Kass and Nussbaum

Beard and Wills

Steven Pinker

Literature and Rhetoric

Homer and Virgil

Sappho

Dante and Chaucer

Montaigne and Bacon

Sor Juana and François Fénelon

Shakespeare and Shaw

John Milton

Samuel Johnson

Emerson and Thoreau

Dickens and Tolstoy

Austen and Wordsworth

Whitman and Frost

Tagore and Achebe

Woolf and Joyce

Tolkien and Lewis

Ellison and Baldwin

Brooks and Koch

Tillie Olsen

Sontag and Eco

Harold Bloom

Shaughnessy and Rose

Burke and Berthoff

Rabassa and Grossman

Mamet and Wilson

Morrison and Kingston

bell hooks

Boynton and Gottlieb

Orwell and Dillard

Solzhenitsyn and Mantel

George Saunders

Adrian Barlow

Sheridan Blau

Smith and Adichie

Politics and Society (and History)

Cleopatra

Christine de Pizan

Castiglione and Machiavelli

Wollstonecraft and Willard

Franklin and Douglass

Milton and Jefferson

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Smith and Mill

Lincoln and Stowe

Stanton, Anthony, Gilman

Fuller and Addams

B. Shaw

Washington and Du Bois

Gandhi and King

George Orwell

Fanon and Arendt

Shirley Chisholm

Nelson Mandela

Said and hooks

Solzhenitsyn and Mantel

Lepore and Harari

Michael Hogan

Guinier and Wu

Stevenson and Jayaraman

Cornel West

Caro and Kearns

Isaacson and Cohen

 

Arts

Leonardo da Vinci

Bach and Kodály

Boulanger and Ségovia

Lange and Kahlo

Stanislavsky and Hagen

Suzuki and DeLay

de Mille and Balanchine

Price and Bernstein

Strasberg and Adler

d’Amboise and Tharp

Pei and Lin

Sontag and Eco

  1. H. Gombrich

Edward S. DiYanni

Scully and Kapilow

Elliot Eisner

Shaw and Gardiner

Camille Paglia

  1. O. Scott

Ma and Marsalis

William V. Costanzo

de Montebello and des Cars

Scorsese and Lee

Adolphe, Child, Lewin

Sister Mary Clarence and Pete Mitchell (Maverick)

 

Science, Social Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine (SSSTEMM)

Averroes

Maimonides

Leonardo da Vinci

Galileo and Newton

Nightingale and Barton

Euler, Hardy, Ramanujan

Blackwell Sisters and Osler

Darwin and Einstein

Feynman and Tufte

Sagan and Firestein

Wilson, Gould, Mazur

Hopper and Jobs

Selzer and Farmer

Frank and Ariely

Henri Petroski

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Greene and Lightman

Bateson and Geertz

Benedict and Mead

Jerome S. Bruner

Daniel Kahneman

Gopnik and P. Bloom

Wilczek and Doudna

Hope Jahren

 

Education

Emma Willard

Comenius and Mann

Pestalozzi and Froebel

Peabody and Bethune

Newman and James

Dewey and Montessori

Piaget and Erikson

Ashton-Warner and Freire

Keller and Sullivan

Mistral and Escalante

Greene and Postman

Burke and Berthoff

Jerome S. Bruner

Boynton and Gottlieb

Scholes and Sandel

Hesburgh and Simmons

Saunders and F. Rogers

John Holt

Sir Ken Robinson

Neill and C. Rogers

Hutchins and Montás

  1. Bloom and Cremin

Parker Palmer

Jonathan Haidt

Darling-Hammond, Gardner, Gates, Jr.

Dweck and Johnston

Hoy and Costanzo

Hogan and Barlow

Mary H. DiYanni

Potpourri: Cooking, Tech, Sports, Broadcasting, Management, Advertising, Design, Museums, Magic, Creativity, Journalism, Fashion

Beard and Child

Lombardi and Jackson

Madden and Costas

Gallwey and Brown

Peter Drucker

Jean Gang

Khan and Lucas

Stewart and Winfrey

Burns and Tyson

de Montebello and des Cars

Ricky Jay

Ogilvy and Foster

Robinson and A. O. Scott

von Oech and de Bono

Grant and Michalko

Friedman and Brooks

Gunn and von Fur

Arts

Leonardo da Vinci

Bach and Kodály

Boulanger and Ségovia

Lange and Kahlo

Stanislavsky and Hagen

Suzuki and DeLay

de Mille and Balanchine

Price and Bernstein

Strasberg and Adler

d’Amboise and Tharp

Pei and Lin

Sontag and Eco

H. Gombrich

anni

Scully and Kapilow

Elliot Eisner

Shaw and Gardiner

Camille Paglia

O. Scott

Ma and Marsalis

William V. Costanzo

de Montebello and des Cars

Scorsese and Lee

Adolphe, Child, Lewin

Sister Mary Clarence and Pete Mitchell (Maverick)

 

Science, Social Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine (SSSTEMM)

Averroes

Maimonides

Leonardo da Vinci

Galileo and Newton

Nightingale and Barton

Euler, Hardy, Ramanujan

Blackwell Sisters and Osler

Darwin and Einstein

Feynman and Tufte

Sagan and Firestein

Wilson, Gould, Mazur

Hopper and Jobs

Selzer and Farmer

Frank and Ariely

Henri Petroski

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Greene and Lightman

Bateson and Geertz

Benedict and Mead

Jerome S. Bruner

Daniel Kahneman

Gopnik and P. Bloom

Wilczek and Doudna

Hope Jahren

 

Education

Emma Willard

Comenius and Mann

Pestalozzi and Froebel

Peabody and Bethune

Newman and James

Dewey and Montessori

Piaget and Erikson

Ashton-Warner and Freire

Keller and Sullivan

Mistral and Escalante

Greene and Postman

Burke and Berthoff

Jerome S. Bruner

Boynton and Gottlieb

Scholes and Sandel

Hesburgh and Simmons

Saunders and F. Rogers

John Holt

Sir Ken Robinson

Neill and C. Rogers

Hutchins and Montás

  1. Bloom and Cremin

Parker Palmer

Jonathan Haidt

Darling-Hammond, Gardner, Gates, Jr.

Dweck and Johnston

Hoy and Costanzo

Hogan and Barlow

Mary H. DiYanni

Potpourri: Cooking, Tech, Sports, Broadcasting, Management, Advertising, Design, Museums, Magic, Creativity, Journalism, Fashion

Beard and Child

Lombardi and Jackson

Madden and Costas

Gallwey and Brown

Peter Drucker

Jean Gang

Khan and Lucas

Stewart and Winfrey

Burns and Tyson

de Montebello and des Cars

Ricky Jay

Ogilvy and Foster

Robinson and A. O. Scott

von Oech and de Bono

Grant and Michalko

Friedman and Brooks

Gunn and von Fur

Science, Social Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine (SSSTEMM)

Averroes

Maimonides

Leonardo da Vinci

Galileo and Newton

Nightingale and Barton

Euler, Hardy, Ramanujan

Blackwell Sisters and Osler

Darwin and Einstein

Feynman and Tufte

Sagan and Firestein

Wilson, Gould, Mazur

Hopper and Jobs

Selzer and Farmer

Frank and Ariely

Henri Petroski

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Greene and Lightman

Bateson and Geertz

Benedict and Mead

Jerome S. Bruner

Daniel Kahneman

Gopnik and P. Bloom

Wilczek and Doudna

Hope Jahren

 

Education

Emma Willard

Comenius and Mann

Pestalozzi and Froebel

Peabody and Bethune

Newman and James

Dewey and Montessori

Piaget and Erikson

Ashton-Warner and Freire

Keller and Sullivan

Mistral and Escalante

Greene and Postman

Burke and Berthoff

Jerome S. Bruner

Boynton and Gottlieb

Scholes and Sandel

Hesburgh and Simmons

Saunders and F. Rogers

John Holt

Sir Ken Robinson

Neill and C. Rogers

Hutchins and Montás

  1. Bloom and Cremin

Parker Palmer

Jonathan Haidt

Darling-Hammond, Gardner, Gates, Jr.

Dweck and Johnston

Hoy and Costanzo

Hogan and Barlow

Mary H. DiYanni

Potpourri: Cooking, Tech, Sports, Broadcasting, Management, Advertising, Design, Museums, Magic, Creativity, Journalism, Fashion

Beard and Child

Lombardi and Jackson

Madden and Costas

Gallwey and Brown

Peter Drucker

Jean Gang

Khan and Lucas

Stewart and Winfrey

Burns and Tyson

de Montebello and des Cars

Ricky Jay

Ogilvy and Foster

Robinson and A. O. Scott

von Oech and de Bono

Grant and Michalko

Friedman and Brooks

Gunn and von Fur

Education

Emma Willard

Comenius and Mann

Pestalozzi and Froebel

Peabody and Bethune

Newman and James

Dewey and Montessori

Piaget and Erikson

Ashton-Warner and Freire

Keller and Sullivan

Mistral and Escalante

Greene and Postman

Burke and Berthoff

Jerome S. Bruner

Boynton and Gottlieb

Scholes and Sandel

Hesburgh and Simmons

Saunders and F. Rogers

John Holt

Sir Ken Robinson

Neill and C. Rogers

Hutchins and Montás

Bloom and Cremin

Parker Palmer

Jonathan Haidt

Darling-Hammond, Gardner, Gates, Jr.

Dweck and Johnston

Hoy and Costanzo

Hogan and Barlow

Mary H. DiYanni

Potpourri: Cooking, Tech, Sports, Broadcasting, Management, Advertising, Design, Museums, Magic, Creativity, Journalism, Fashion

Beard and Child

Lombardi and Jackson

Madden and Costas

Gallwey and Brown

Peter Drucker

Jean Gang

Khan and Lucas

Stewart and Winfrey

Burns and Tyson

de Montebello and des Cars

Ricky Jay

Ogilvy and Foster

Robinson and A. O. Scott

von Oech and de Bono

Grant and Michalko

Friedman and Brooks

Gunn and von Fur

Potpourri: Cooking, Tech, Sports, Broadcasting, Management, Advertising, Design, Museums, Magic, Creativity, Journalism, Fashion

Beard and Child

Lombardi and Jackson

Madden and Costas

Gallwey and Brown

Peter Drucker

Jean Gang

Khan and Lucas

Stewart and Winfrey

Burns and Tyson

de Montebello and des Cars

Ricky Jay

Ogilvy and Foster

Robinson and A. O. Scott

von Oech and de Bono

Grant and Michalko

Friedman and Brooks

Gunn and von Fur

Robert DiYanni

Robert DiYanni

Robert DiYanni

Author ⪢ | Professor ⪢ | Consultant ⪢

Robert DiYanni is a professor of humanities at New York University, having served as an  instructional consultant at the NYU Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Center for Faculty Advancement. For these centers he conducted workshops and seminars on all aspects of pedagogy, consulted with faculty about teaching concerns, visited and observed classes, and provided a wide range of pedagogical consultative services. Professor DiYanni serves on the faculties of the School of Professional Studies and the Stern School of Business at NYU. He earned his undergraduate degree in English from Rutgers University, attended a Master of Arts in Teaching program at Johns Hopkins University, and received a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the City University of New York Graduate Center.  

In addition to his work at NYU, Dr. DiYanni has taught at City University of New York, at Pace University, and as a Visiting Professor at Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and at Harvard University. As a high school teacher for four years and a college professor for more than four decades, Professor DiYanni has taught students from eighth grade through doctoral candidates. Most of his teaching, however, has been with college and university undergraduates. His numerous workshops, offered in more than twenty countries, have been attended by secondary school teachers and administrators, as well as by undergraduate college and university faculty and administrators.

Dr. DiYanni has written and edited numerous textbooks, among them, Literature: An Introduction; The Scribner Handbook for Writers (with Pat C. Hoy II); Arts and Culture: An Introduction to the Humanities, (with Janetta Rebold Benton), the basis for a series of lectures given at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Modern American Poets: Their Voices and Visions, which served as a companion text for the PBS television series Voices and Vision, which aired in the late 1980s.

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