TACTics Journal
A Publication for and by TOC for Education Practitioners
July  2007

 

In this issue:

 

-  A Welcome Note by the Editor

- TOC and the Big Brother project Zana Borisavljevic, Serbia

-  POOGI in the Netherlands Petra Pouw-Legêne, Holland

-  Lapses  Alan McTavish, UK

- 10th International TOCfE Conference Reminder

 

A Welcome Note by the Editor

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

I hope you have all enjoyed the month of July. As most of you have probably seen it in the news, Belgrade has been one of the hottest cities during the last few weeks. I don’t like the cold, so whenever I hear myself complaining I remind myself that I am lucky I don’t live somewhere really cold.

In this issue we have some info about an interesting project in which I am participating, some news from Petra in Holland, an article by Alan, our electronic mailman, and a reminder of the TOCfE conference in Florida.

For the readers in the USA, through some non-TOC contacts in the States I heard that the National Staff Development Council has asked for applications to Present at the 2008 NSDC Summer Conference in Orlando, Florida. The theme of the conference is Creating a World of Wonder in Professional Learning and I thought that perhaps there might be some of you out there who would be able to make a presentation of TOC. More on http://www.nsdc.org/summer08V2/proposals/ 

 

All the best,

Zana Borisavljevic  jana.b@talk21.com 

 

TOC and the Big Brother project Zana Borisavljevic, Serbia

During the last couple of years I have been involved in a series of trainings for improving inter-ethnic communication between young Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. I have been including TOC whenever I could and last year we even had a bi-lingual manual published introducing the Cloud and the Tree as tools that can be used in building a multi-ethnic community. This year I have been asked to work as a consultant in a very interesting project run by an American organization Academy of Educational Development (www.aed.org) in Kosovo. A group of Serbian and Albanian young people will be taken through a 5 day training in communication and strategic planning (the biggest part of the training will focus on the Cloud and the Tree) and then they will be divided into two mixed groups and will be given 8 ambitious targets to achieve (each time three days to achieve a task). The whole process will be recorded, starting from initial interviews with the participants, training, planning and achieving the tasks, and it will all be made into a series that will be shown on Serbian and Albanian TV stations. There will be 12 episodes, 8 of which will be showing how the participants are working together to achieve an ambitious target. There will be a panel of celebrities who will be judging how well the participants are using the tools they will have learnt in the training. Another person AED have got as a consultant is a famous Macedonian director who has worked on the Big Brother show and is well know in this region for his creativity. A CD-Rom and a manual will be produced as a part of the project which will be given out to schools and educational institutions as teaching material that can be used for working with children on issues of tolerance and conflict prevention.

This weekend a group of us are getting together to work on developing criteria for choosing the participants and the activities that they will be asked to do in the second part of the project. The training will take part in November and until then I will be working on creating the training materials. I am very excited to be a part of this project and will keep you posted about how it’s going.

 

POOGI in the Netherlands Petra Pouw-Legêne, Holland                                                                     pouw.legene@planet.nl

Annemie Knibbe and I started our first TOC for Education workshop exactly a year ago. Since then many more workshops were given by the two of us. We have grown into a strong team. Our policy is that students who have attended the workshop sessions 1,2,3 can review as often as they want.  Our AT is to build a strong network. Our personal goal is to go for quality and we only want small groups to make every course an interactive event. So far many students have taken the opportunity to review, some more than once.

Even though it’s the same material, the groups responded differently to it. Quite often students in one group found other needs and injections than the earlier group on the same conflict (e.g. The opening story of Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White). To our students the message was clear from the beginning: there is no set solution to a problem. It depends on the needs. In the mean time nine students finished all 5 sessions. We have seen some remarkable changes in attitude. Some students who were rather outspoken changed over the year into attentive listeners. TOCfE definitely made the difference.

So now Annemie and I are ready for the next step: 9 students who finished all five sessions are going to assist us in the upcoming workshops. Some of them are working on their pilots already. One group of students meets regularly to practice.

Besides giving the workshops, I work with the tools of TOCfE all the time. I want to give two examples:

1. Working with the cloud during a meeting of counselors

I was invited to give a talk for a group of 25 colleagues, all Davis counselors. (see www.davisdyslexia.com) on the topic: How to improve contact with my pupils’ parents. I decided to use TOCfE to answer this question.

Two weeks before the meeting took place, I invited the counselors to write down the current situation: what went well, what went wrong. I was very pleased to get response from 21 colleagues who signed up and from 5 others who were not able to attend the meeting. I made a list of all the obstacles. From that list –which mainly showed mistakes of  OTHERS- I distilled a few conflicts  (do I tell the parent that he is too bossy, do I not tell …; do I let the parent attend the counseling /do I not let the parent attend… ) and worked out the clouds, just to be prepared. Because everybody had told their ‘stories’ already, nobody felt the need to tell them again during the meeting, which saved a lot of time. After I had explained the concept of TOC everybody wrote down one conflict they would like to solve. Everyone read aloud what they had written. It turned out that there were four major issues. I asked them to decide for themselves which one was the most interesting. 

This is the issue: counselors often doubt if they should start working with a child with a problematic background. So in terms of TOC, this is their cloud. It took quite some thinking and discussion to fill in all the boxes, especially C:

D:  I am certain that it’s OK to start the counseling

B:  I rely on my talents and competence

A:  Help a child to develop 

D’: I am not certain that it’s OK to start the counseling

C:   I need to feel safe

A:  Help a child to develop

 

Then we discussed the assumptions.

This is the injection everyone agreed on: I can start a counseling with a child with a problematic background when I can rely on a network of professionals for support and feed-back and - if need be - referral.

Many counselors now have an ambitious target: to create such a network.

 

2. Working with an AT in a school

In one school I am training the teachers in kindergarten to 3rd grade to use the Davis Learning Strategies (DLS) (see: www.davislearn.com)

After 6 months of experimenting with small groups of children in their classrooms, the teachers are ready  to create a plan for next year. The director invited the team and me to a meeting. We had only one and a half hour after school, because it’s a very busy time right now for everybody. So two weeks before the meeting I invited the team to describe their current situation. I made sure they knew that everything they wrote was OK. The more obstacles the better, I let them know, because that way there would be  no surprises later on. They all replied and I put all the obstacles on post-it’s. Since we had so little time for the meeting, I decided to categorize the obstacles in advance. Ten different items emerged, which I ‘transformed’ into intermediate objectives.  I made two stacks of all the IO’s using bigger post-its and took the paper on which I had pasted all the obstacles with the corresponding IO’s  to the meeting. Everyone could find his/her obtacle(s) on the chart. It created team spirit right away, something I missed in the earlier meetings. I handed out a printed version of the chart to everyone present.

Before we were going to work on the Pr.Tr. the team needed to decide if they wanted to continue with the DLS at all. One teacher f.e. wanted to be able to choose between DLS and other strategies, while another teacher just wanted to only use DLS. I asked them to look at their need and this was the AT they came up with:

As the team of kindergarten and grades 1, 2 and 3 we are able to recognize the non-verbal thinking children and can offer them adequate learning materials and strategies.

 

Then  I asked them to read the IO’s and let me know if they agreed on my ‘transformation’ of their obstacles into IO’s, which they did. They split up into two groups, one for kindergarten and first grade and one for grades 2 and 3. The two teams discussed the prerequisite tree (Pr.Tr.) and were busy for about 20 minutes to arrange the IO’s. The two Pr. Tr.’s turned out very similar. My main problem was that the teachers started to argue about how to reach a specific IO all the time. I had to remind them constantly to finish the Pr. Tr. first and insert  the actions later.

The result: the team was very pleased with the AT.

The first action now is to study the DLS manual again. At the same time, one of the teachers is going to set up a plan for more practice-meetings. The RT already made an appointment with another school to see how they work with DLS. 

 

Lapses  Alan McTavish, UK

Alan is a College Lecturer and an IT specialist    alan@mct-ltd.com

It’s strange how reality sometimes steps up and slaps you in the face.  It’s in those not-too-serious lapses which I’m sure we all experience but which, if we are not careful, can drag us back down to the level we were at before TOC.  Take this simple example for instance.

It’s their last lesson with me this year – next week, they are into their exams and then, with any luck, they are off to University.  They have to present their work in the form of a PowerPoint presentation and I have already given a weeks extension because half of the class were not ready last week.  I’m nice like that!

We’ll call him Sam for the sake of it.  He’s actually quite a nice guy but, being of West Indian heritage and standing about 6 foot 5 tall (2 meters) his mere presence is quite intimidating.  He is also quite loud.

Things to bear in mind … 

a)     Our HND is, in effect, the first two years of a degree course.

b)     I’m only teaching it because the regular lecturer is on long-term sick leave.  (I’m nice like that!)

c)      I have been dropped into a very ‘deep end’.

d)     On Mondays, I have a thirty minute break during which time I really ought to eat.

e)     I’m busy!

f)        They can pass without doing the presentation!

 

On the way into the admin office, Sam catches my attention.  Assumption No. 1 - ‘He hasn’t done the work and wants an extension’.  I fiddle about in the office doing whatever and, on the way out, Sam says …

“Alan, what order are we presenting in? I’ve left my presentation at home…”

Here it comes guys, I’m still in transit along the corridor and I say, with my back to him …

“Well, if you can’t present – you’ve failed!”

Assumption No. 2 - ‘He hasn’t done the work and wants an extension’.  I turn the corner – I could kick myself.  I should go back and apologise, make some arrangement.  But, I’ll make myself look a fool – in the foyer, in front of everyone!

I reach my office and step inside.  ‘He doesn’t live far away’ I tell myself, ‘If he has any sense, he’ll run home and get the presentation – that is, of course, if he’s actually done it!’

I go downstairs to the refectory for some food, almost in the hopes that I’ll bump in to Sam.  But I don’t.

Within minutes I suppose, other thoughts take over and I am consumed by questions and statements that other students and colleagues throw my way.  But then, in no time at all, I’m in the classroom setting up the data projector for the presentations.

Students are filtering in – but there’s no sign of Sam. I’m going slow, taking minutes out of the beginning of the lesson.  Will he appear?  Did he go home and get his work?

Then, his lumbering presence fills the doorway and he waves a memory stick and smiles at me.  I return the smile and we settle down to what proves to be seven very good presentations.  Sam’s, in particular, is surprisingly good and there is no way that it could have been hashed together in about half an hour.

As I’m packing up, Sam comes up to me and says …

“That was a bit harsh!”

“Yes,” I reply, “but it made you take responsibility for your own education – made you go home and get it”

“I know” He said, “but I was only going to ask you to wait for me.  You didn’t let me finish!”

“For that,” I said, “I apologise.  I was in a hurry and not in the best of humours.”

“Like three years ago,” said Sam with a huge grin on his face, “when you told me to turn my ‘bloody’ music off.”

“Ouch!” I thought as he walked away, but at least that was in my TOC infancy and I was still teaching according to the book and not TOC.  It just shows though that these guys remember!

The words ‘Practice’ and ‘Preach’ come to mind.  My college have not taken TOCfE on board.  They are like most other British institutions, possibly because of government rules and regulations, in that they won’t risk the change.  However, on that note, they are listening to me ‘off the record’ and I can see myself doing a staff development day in the near future. 

On the other hand, most students that pass my way for more than one lesson, have an insight of what TOCfE is all about.  I do a brief ‘consequences’ thing with them where they all play the part of Germs (which amuses them) and a ‘Why are you here?’ induction.

The moral of the story is, of course, that it’s easy for us to show the youngsters how to use Clouds and Branches and Trees but it’s not so easy for us to use them on ourselves – especially in the heat of the moment.  Therefore, we can’t expect them to remember to use the tools when their emotions are running high.

These are ‘Thinking’ tools but we don’t always think to use them – particularly on ourselves.  We don’t want to appear like Miss Trunchbole in the movie ‘Matilda’ …

“I’m big – you’re small.  I’m right – you’re wrong and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

Alan McTavish – your friendly TACTics electronic mailman.

 

10th International TOCfE Conference Reminder

10th TOCfE International Conference

October 11-14, 2007

Ft. Walton Beach Florida, USA

Keynote:    Dr. Eli Goldratt

 

Airport:          VPS:  (Valparaiso, Florida, USA)

Venue:          Ramada Plaza Beach Resort

                        Group Rates Block Until September 10, 2007:

Double occupancy from: Standard $119 to Gulf Front $149. All rooms with refrigerator, coffee maker, hairdryer, personal safe, iron   &  board, TV  www.ramadafwb.com

Reservations: 1.800.874.8962.  Must mention TOCfE to receive block rates.

Conference Fees:  Incl. all lunches, coffee breaks and materials 50% discount to k16 educators                                                                                                                                                             By Sept 1:  Per day/$100;  full conference (4 days): $300  ($50/day $150/full conference for k-16 educators) After Sept 1:  Per day/ $150;  full conference: $400  ($ 75 day/$200/full conference for k-16 educators

Register now: www.tocforeducation.com    Questions:   Kathy Suerkensuerken@cox.net