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
-
POOGI in the
- Lapses Alan McTavish,
- 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,
In this issue we have some info about an
interesting project in which I am participating, some news from
For the readers in the
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
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,
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
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:
I was invited to give a talk for a
group of 25 colleagues, all
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,
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
Keynote: Dr.
Eli Goldratt
Airport: VPS: (Valparaiso, Florida, USA)
Venue:
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: