Kurt Lewin

Kurt Lewin (1890 to 1947) was a German-American psychologist born in Mogilno, in the Prussian Province of Posen, who is widely regarded as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational and applied psychology. He studied at several German universities and completed his doctorate at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where he later served as a professor from 1926 to 1932 and ran experiments on tension states, needs, motivation and learning. After emigrating to the United States in 1933 he worked at Cornell University, the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station at the University of Iowa, and the Center for Group Dynamics at MIT. His research and writing centred on applied research, action research and group communication, and he is often called the founder of social psychology and one of the first scholars to study group dynamics and organizational development. For education his work matters because action research and the study of how people learn and change in groups became foundations for later cooperative learning, teacher inquiry and organizational learning in schools.