Mentors

Many of the world’s leading thinkers have personally contributed to the evolution of the Ross Model and participated in our efforts to expand and reshape education. Courtney Sale Ross founded Ross School and Ross Institute in collaboration with expert mentors William Irwin Thompson and Ralph Abraham, who served as co-architects of the Ross Spiral Curriculum, and Howard Gardner as consultant for pedagogy and assessment. The founding curriculum document, “Cultural History and the Evolution of Consciousness,” was written by Thompson in 1995. From that beginning, the Ross Mentor Program has maintained and expanded relationships with a diverse array of experts including mind brain education scholars, neuroscientists, media specialists, cultural historians, chaos mathematicians and more. Mentors and scholars assist with curriculum development, guide workshops for Ross School faculty and the Institute’s educational experts. They also present and meet with students and lead research projects aimed at improving teaching and learning.

Among those who count themselves as Ross Mentors are economist Jeremy Rifkin, neuroscientist and inventor Hideaki Koizumi, scientist and engineer Danny Hillis, sociologist Pedro Noguera, neuroscientists Antonio and Hanna Damasio, paleoanthropologist Yves Coppens, sociologist and media scholar Sherry Turkle; cultural psychologists Carola and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco; global education thought leader and futurist Charles Fadel; and many more.  

Mentor Presentations