Robert Sternberg, the new dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, gave students a preview of his priorities and plans Sunday night.
Sternberg, who joined the University Aug. 15, stopped by the Tufts Community Union Senate's weekly meeting in the campus center. He said students need to have more than book smarts to get by in the world.
During his prepared speech, Sternberg said the job of a university is to "develop leaders of the next generation, and not necessarily CEOs and presidents."
Before he came to Tufts, Sternberg ran the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies and Expertise at Yale University.
He told the senators that in addition to analytic intelligence, two other kinds of intelligence matter: creative intelligence and practical intelligence. Creative skills are necessary to be an innovative leader, and practical skills are the means to "make ideas work," he said.
"You really need to develop other skills," Sternberg said.
Part of his work as dean, Sternberg said, will be working with professors to introduce them to teaching methods directed at different learning styles. While it is easier for professors to focus on students' creative and practical skills in smaller classes, he said, it can also be done in larger lecture classes.
Sternberg described an introductory psychology class he taught at Yale of 150 students. He let students choose their projects and gave creative exam essay questions.
He also spoke about the Rainbow Project at Yale, which developed ways to allow the SAT to better test creative and practical skills. The changes included having students invent captions for New Yorker cartoons, write short stories from given titles, and tell a story based on a collage.
Trained teachers would grade creative and practical work on "how novel, how good, and how appropriate they are to the assignment," Sternberg said.
Sternberg plans to teach a course on leadership next semester and an introductory psychology course in the future.
- Kristen Sawicki
