Tregoe Education Forum

Erin had a new book on her desk earlier this week, Analytic Processes for School Leaders. One co-author was Tregoe, one of the founders of Kepner-Tregoe. I studied their work back in 80's, The Rational Manager. Just discovered they did the NEW Rational Manager in the 90's. Missed that one, I guess.

The subtitle on the first one was "A Systematic Approach to Problem Solving and Decision Making". Pretty cool eh - I've always loved this kinda stuff? I always thought their work going back into the 50's would have been more studied in the 80's if we hadn't been so taken with the Japanese work and approaches.

Tregoe formed the Tregoe Education Forum in the 90's, my sense at the end of his distinguished career. I've supscribed to the newsletter and plan to keep track of this effort. On the site I found a great link to a quick organizational assessment tool - your Analytical Thinking Quotient.
Took it and it helped me think about the pay off to using their framework.

Some of the other material on the website was targeted to teachers and students. Yes, I think this type of material is needed to help meet the DMPS New Ends of critcial thinking, problem solving and decision making. I thought of our new Current Issues class - what opportunities - check out yourtake.org. I also thought of the systems thinking research I did a year ago. If we are serouis about helping our students learn these skills, but resources are available - and increasingly at no cost. Cost to learn and adapt - sure. Cost for the material - no to not much. I think of the Einstein quote on Creativity - "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

Little wonder that 21st Century skills have gotten relatively little action and only some attention. Up until recently, we've been flying pretty high. Things are GOOD - the exception being 9/11. Today we have a world economic crisis of unknown proportions and duration, we have North Korea playing with missles and nuclear weapons, we have a ship captain being help hostage off the coast of Somalia by pirates. NPR referred to this current type of pirate activity as the worst the world has seen since the Barbary Wars in the 1780's. Yes - we face "significant problems". Will our educational institutions respond with new levels of thinking or same-o same-o? Only we can decide.....