TACTics Journal
A Publication for and by TOC for Education Practitioners
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 <
Mark your calendars and register TODAY at:
http://www.svsu.edu/cgi-bin/remark3/itd/rws3.pl?FORM=DSA
for the
register at:
www.tocforeducation.com.
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,
• The Core Problem of Organizations, Julie Wright,
• Incorporating the Thinking Instrumentation of TOC into Colleges
of
Education Courses,
• An Introduction to the TOC Strategic and Tactic Tree, Javier Arevalo,
• 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,
• A TOC Game for Early Learners (4-7), Mr.
• Applying the Principles of TOC to Continuously Improve
Matriculation
Test Scores,
• The Solar System, Mike Round,
• Using TOC as a Writing Process, Eleanor May-Brenneker,
• Great Books Discussion, Moderator
TBA
• There will also be “rooms” for discussion groups, such as a
Spanish Chat
Room and a room for
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
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
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
for making this conference possible.
ELEMENTARY/SECONDARY TACTICS
(2) The Teens’ TOC Thinking Workshop
By Khaw Choon Ean, TOCFE Director for
When you live in
work seminar in June and you are given the option of an extended
few days’
holiday in
back home. Crazy as it seems, I was rushing home to run the first
ever
official Teens’ TOC Thinking Workshops in
The event was planned by the “Newspaper In Education” (NIE) Unit
of the
national English newspaper in
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
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
mountain range and south, next to
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
CONNECTIONS
(3) A Couple of Quotes
From Philip Bakker,
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
should reach us by
mail to: Cheryl A. Edwards,
49719,
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.