TACTics Journal

A Publication for and by TOC for Education Practitioners

2 July 2004

In this week’s issue:

Networking

(1) TOCFE Virtual Conference Update, Kathy Suerken

Elementary/Secondary TACTics

(2) The Teens’ TOC Thinking Workshop, Khaw Choon Ean

Connections

(3) A Couple of Quotes, Philip Bakker

Editors’ Notes

(4) Kay Buckner-Seal, Cheryl A. Edwards

NETWORKING

(1) TOCFE Virtual Conference Update

From Kathy Suerken <suerken@cox.net>

Mark your calendars and register TODAY at:

http://www.svsu.edu/cgi-bin/remark3/itd/rws3.pl?FORM=DSA

for the September 18-21, 2004 TOCFE Virtual Conference. You may also

register at:

www.tocforeducation.com.

Saginaw Valley State University is providing this service to TOCFE free of

charge, thus enabling TOCFE to offer the conference with no fees.

Registration is simple and takes about 20 seconds. Please register now as

there are potential space limitations due to limited human resources who

have to meet processing requirements.

We expect participants from over 20 nations. Presentations will include:

A Special Q & A session with our founder, Dr. Eli Goldratt

• TOC and the Joy of Math: Mike Round, USA

• The Core Problem of Organizations, Julie Wright, UK

• Incorporating the Thinking Instrumentation of TOC into Colleges of

Education Courses, Gila Glatter, Israel

• An Introduction to the TOC Strategic and Tactic Tree, Javier Arevalo,

Venezuela

• An Analysis of Middle School Literature, International Students

• The Impact of TOC on the Children of Colombia (especially as it enables

those children who are coping with child abuse), Rafael, Francis and Ana

Maria Conde, Colombia

• A TOC Game for Early Learners (4-7), Mr. Ling, Malaysia

• Applying the Principles of TOC to Continuously Improve Matriculation

Test Scores, Nava Weiss, Israel

• The Solar System, Mike Round, USA

• Using TOC as a Writing Process, Eleanor May-Brenneker, Netherlands

• Great Books Discussion, Moderator TBA

• There will also be “rooms” for discussion groups, such as a Spanish Chat

Room and a room for AGOAL Academy.

Due to many requests, we have extended the abstract application deadline

until July 7. Please describe your presentation in 200 words or less and

submit them to dsirias@svsu.edu or to me at suerken@cox.net. We are

working on posting these descriptions as well as a schedule on our

conference web page. That site will be announced in the next TACTics and

will be linked to the TOCFE web site.

I have just received very exciting word that TOCFE Champion, Daniel Brown,

of Leon, Mexico, has recently trained a group of teachers who very much

want to participate in our conference. Daniel is arranging for the local

branch of a large Mexican University (ITESM) to host a TOCFE Virtual

Conference link (site) for us.

As a reminder, all you need to participate is access to the Internet. We will

provide simple instructions. Don't miss out on this extraordinary

opportunity to learn, to teach and, most of all, to meaningfully contribute

to our goal of preparing children for life.

A special thank you to Danilo Sirias and to Saginaw Valley State University

for making this conference possible.

ELEMENTARY/SECONDARY TACTICS

(2) The Teens’ TOC Thinking Workshop

By Khaw Choon Ean, TOCFE Director for Asia

When you live in Asia and get to go to the United Kingdom on an induction

work seminar in June and you are given the option of an extended few days’

holiday in London, would you take it? Well, I didn’t. There was a bigger lure

back home. Crazy as it seems, I was rushing home to run the first ever

official Teens’ TOC Thinking Workshops in Malaysia.

The event was planned by the “Newspaper In Education” (NIE) Unit of the

national English newspaper in Malaysia, the New Straits Times (NST). NST

had given me a page every Tuesday in the educational supplement from

January to May 2004 to write on TOC for teens. (There was another page

on Wednesdays for elementary school kids). I had started on a

Malaysianized version of The Never-Ending Story and the last episode had

touched on an ending note that the story will never end if the teen

characters in the story and all those out there reading it will continue using

TOC in their lives.

The story had started with the main character, Liza, coming back to school

after attending a holiday TOC Workshop. The story was ending with Liza

going off again during the May vacation to be a “cucumber” at another TOC

Workshop. The NST group editor decided to make the Teens’ TOC Holiday

Workshop a reality.

I was asked how many teens between 13 and 15 years old I could handle at

one go. After I was shown the training centre rooms and facilities I said,

“Hmmm, sixty, at most?”

They put an announcement in the newspaper that a 2-day Teens’ TOC

Thinking Skills Workshop would be held in the NIE Training Centre in Kuala

Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia.

A few days later, Kulwant, the lady at the NIE Unit in charge of organizing

the workshop rang me and asked, “Tell me, how many can you really, really

handle?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, we have had an overwhelming response…can you handle 70?”

AND… a few days later, she called again, gasping, “Now tell me, can you do a

second workshop, please, back-to-back?”

“What?” I asked.

“We’ve got 140!” she said. “We can’t turn them away. Some are from other

states!”

And so as it turned out, we settled for two 2-day workshops back-to-back

catering for 70 kids each. And they came, from all over the country, some

making journeys by bus, train, cars from as far as 200-300 kilometres from

the north, near the border of Thailand, east, on the other side of the

mountain range and south, next to Singapore. Considering some of these are

13-year-olds traveling on their own, I felt really touched. Some came with

friends, some with siblings. One lady registered 7 kids from her

neighbourhood.

Then came the REAL story…the workshop itself.

I had assistants in Shameem and Sarina and Keenan, my 11-year old, proudly

wore a label “CUCUMBER” on his chest. The NIE Unit offered extra hands

if I needed any. We’d prepared a “TOC Thinking Folio” for the kids. And

each large group of 70 was divided into 10 sub-groups. The programme had

CLOUDs for the 1st day and the Branch and Ambitious Target for the 2nd

day. The size of the group and the constraint of two days meant that we

had to apply accelerated learning techniques. All 3 of us were experienced

teachers and Keenan has been a TOC practitioner and “teacher” since he was

8 years old. We were all set…

Alas… we found out that many of the kids were signed up by their parents!

Only a handful read the announcement and signed up on their own. And they

had to be there so early in the morning, so what greeted us? Long faces,

sleepy faces, blank faces… a few gave sheepish smiles. We knew we had a

task ahead.

We did ice-breaking techniques as these kids didn’t know each other. For

each of the tools we also did a “warm-up” group activity. A tug of war

warmed them up to the concept of conflict, a game of “passing the message”

brought out the importance of cause and effect and “building the tallest

free-standing paper tower” put them through a real ambitious target

collaborative process driven by a time constraint and limited materials given

to them. We found that after these warm-up activities it was very easy to

go into the underlying thinking process for teaching the tools.

As experienced teachers we also knew the kids could not sit long and listen

to lectures so we did not even try that. The workshop was built on a series

of individual and group activities each leading them a step further in the

understanding of the tools and finally ending with an application task for

each sub group to work on to reinforce the learning process.

We told them at the beginning that they would learn tools that will give

them a set of lifelong behavioral skills that included conflict resolution,

dealing with negative behaviour, giving constructive criticism and strategic

planning. We even had time to use the tools with content from Malaysian

school subjects so that they could try out how each tool could be used in

their schoolwork.

We could see the change in the children as they realized the power of the

tools. There were moments when the children were so quiet as they listened

to the debriefing that you could hear a pin drop. Their faces were totally

engrossed. It was such a change from how they started. By the second day

these teenagers were like old friends, working together. There were a few

attention-seeking ones and a few really quiet thoughtful ones but that is all

normal in a class of kids.

At the end of 2 days the walls of the room were plastered with the efforts

of group work as each group was allocated “exhibition space”. Their folios

were filled with clouds from problems they wanted solved or clouds drawn

from the conflicts of teenagers taken from a teenage column in the

newspapers. The exhibition space had the group efforts of predicting an

outcome based on the branch. Their final exhibits were Target Trees

“grown” by each group from the “stepping stones” based on obstacles from a

target set in one of the episodes of the Never Ending Story. One corner of

the room had the paper towers built by each group. It was a vast difference

from the pristinely sterile room we started with.

After the first workshop, the mother of one girl, Raissa, emailed Kulwant to

ask what we had done to her daughter. She said she had sent her daughter

to so many types of workshops and this was the first time Raissa had come

home saying she had enjoyed the workshop and found it interesting. It made

our day.

Most memorable was the second workshop where we had a thirteen year old,

home-schooled boy who struck us as slightly “special” maybe, autistic. He

was in a world of his own filled with burritos, burgers, coca cola and

Superman. Yet he could use the tools correctly for the logic of his world.

We were impressed by his efforts.

And the lesson we ourselves learned from the Teens TOC Thinking

Workshops? Remarkably kids are easier to teach the TOC tools to. They

grasp them so easily and it makes me wonder why adults were harder to

teach? Most remarkable of all was that I found myself learning from the

kids as they had such fresh, ingenuous ways of looking at situations and

coming up with ideas and solutions. I have learnt to never, never

underestimate any child.

Well, although we thought the kids had a good time, we did not really know

until we ended the workshop with a Circle of Knowledge where everyone

stood in one big circle, each person uttering one word to describe their

experience of what they have learnt. I think we were either very confident

or very brave!

Imagine our utter gratification when these teenagers were giving us words

like “Awesome” “Wow” “Fabulistic” “Marvelous” “Extraordinary”

“Stupendous”! And it really made our day when looking at their pen-andpaper

evaluation of the work shop, more than 85% had rated us 9 or 10 out

of 10 with one even rating us 10+1 out of 10!

This sort of response from TEENAGERS, for which everything is blasé and

not cool to like something, we thought it was really a great compliment! One

boy even wrote, “I can see myself using these tools all my life,” and I think

this is just what made it worthwhile, giving up my holiday in London for.

CONNECTIONS

(3) A Couple of Quotes

From Philip Bakker, Netherlands

Thanks for keeping up the work for the TACTics Journal. It's appreciated.

I always check it out immediately.

I just read that the readers like quotes and words of “wizdom.” The last

years I regularly jot down great lines I run into. Here are a couple regarding

learning that I found inspiring from Don Juan, Winston Churchill, Douglas

Adams, Confucius, Jean Piaget, Harry Morgan Moses and W.E. Deming.

Maybe I already sent in the ones from Deming and Confucius but they

remain nice anyway. :-)

Have a great day!

• "The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing

new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done -

men who are creative, inventive and discoverers. —Jean Piaget, 1896-

1980, Swiss Experimenters and Theorists

• "We learn to think about everything. Then we train our eyes to look as we

think about the things." —Don Juan

• "Joy in learning comes not so much from what is learned but from

learning." —W.E. Deming, The New Economy, p.145

• "Personally, I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being

taught." —Winston Churchill

• You cannot learn if you are convinced that you already know. —Harry

Morgan Moses

• "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from

the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent

disinclination to do so." —Douglas Adams

• "Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is

perilous." —Confucius, 6th Century BC

EDITORS’ NOTES

(4) Kay Buckner-Seal, Cheryl A. Edwards

What a wonderful collaboration—our first “monthly’’ TACTics is one of the

best! Thanks to all who made contributions. We have two reminders: (1)

Don’t forget to register for the TOCFE Virtual Conference. In fact, you

may as well register right now while you’re online. And, (2) our next issue will

be published on Friday, August 6, 2004. So that means any submissions

should reach us by Monday, August 2, 2004. Please send your articles by

mail to: Cheryl A. Edwards, 2253 S. Hill Island Rd., Cedarville, Michigan

49719, USA. Or send hyperlink to cedwards@cedarville.net or

kayseal@comcast.net.

Please note that the pdf version of TACTics is attached. You must have

Acrobat Reader to open the file. It is freely available for download from:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html. If you have the

Reader installed but still can't open the file, drag it from this e-mail to your

desktop, launch the Reader, and open from the FILE menu.

You may also view TACTics in its intended formatting, by visiting our web

site at www.tocforeducation.com. Click on “What’s New.”

Note: If you no longer wish to receive TACTics, you may unsubscribe by replying to this e-mail and typing

the word “unsubscribe” in the subject line.