DR. RICHARD WEISSBOURD, FACULTY DIRECTOR & SENIOR LECTURER

Richard Weissbourd is a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he co-directs the Human Development and Psychology Program, and the Kennedy School of Government. His work focuses on moral development, vulnerability and resilience in childhood and effective schools and services for children. He directs the Making Caring Common Project, a national effort to make moral and social development priorities in child-raising and to provide strategies to schools and parents for promoting in children caring, a commitment to justice and other key moral and social capacities. He leads the Turning the Tide initiative, a collaborative effort involving over 200 college admissions offices that are seeking to elevate and more effectively assess ethical character, increase equity and access and reduce excessive achievement pressure in the college admissions process. He has also conducted research on how older adults can better mentor young adults and teenagers in developing caring, ethical, mature romantic relationships. 

He is a founder of several interventions for at-risk children, including ReadBoston and WriteBoston, city-wide literacy initiatives led by Mayor Menino. He is also a founder of a pilot school in Boston, the Lee Academy, that begins with children at 3 years old. He has advised on the city, state and federal levels on family policy, parenting and school reform and has written for numerous scholarly and popular publications and blogs, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today and NPR.  He is the author of The Vulnerable Child: What Really Hurts America’s Children and What We Can Do About It (Addison-Wesley, 1996), named by the American School Board Journal as one of the top 10 education books of all time.  His most recent book, The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development (Houghton Mifflin 2009), was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 24 books of 2009.