Prof. Yoram Harpaz was born in Kibbutz Lohamey Hagetaot (The Ghetto Fighters) in the north of Israel, a kibbutz established by Holocaust survivors. He wrote a book for young readers on his childhood in this special place (The Spring Children, 1996).
He left the kibbutz in 1976 to earn a BA in history and philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He then went on to receive an MA and PhD in education there.
In 1981 he became a history and philosophy teacher in Boyer High School in Jerusalem.
He left teaching in 1987 and became a journalist, writing on social, cultural, political, and educational issues.
In 1992 he was accepted as a Fellow at Mandel School for Educational Leadership.
In 1994 he had started working at the Branco Weiss Institute for the Development of Thinking, where he was in charge of the Community of Thinking Project and the publications of the Institute. He published a book describing the CoT theory and practice (Teaching and Learning in a Community of Thinking: The Third Model. Springer, 2014). The model is implemented in Israel and other countries.
In 2000-2001 he was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where he wrote his dissertation on teaching thinking. Based on this work he published a book The Hook, The Bait, and the Fish: Approaches to Teaching Thinking (2005. In Hebrew) He presented the ideas of this book in MOOK under the same title. In 2003 he joined the faculty of the Mandel School for Educational Leadership and then was appointed director of the school.
Since 2006 he has been a senior lecturer in Beit Berl College and in Al-Qasemy Teachers College, and the chief editor of Hed Hachinuch (Educational Echoes, the largest educational journal in Israel).
He published seven books, among them Educational Design in Six Steps: A strategic and Practical Scaffold. Routledge, 2020. The book was published also in Hebrew, Chinese and Arabic.
