Eric's Reflections on 2008

Looking back on 2008 I realise that once again I've had an incredibly interesting year, with the dual demands of Rodin Educational Consultancy and ITC Publications. The year started off in Queensland at Mt Isa TAFE, working in scorching temperatures, then on to cool Toowoomba the next day followed by a workshop at Merrimac SHS on the Gold Coast. The next two weeks saw me working in New Zealand at Rotorua, Hamilton, Wanaka, Alexandra and Dunedin. What a contrast from hot to cool! These opening weeks set the pattern of extremes for 2008. I enjoyed five more trips to New Zealand, ranging from a single day trip to Nelson, to two weeks of finding myself in a different town of the North Island each day.

'Action shots' from workshops!!!

Throughout the year I have had the pleasure of working with schools, students and teachers in Longreach, Newcastle, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, Rockhampton and the Gold Coast to name just a few! I've also been fortunate to be involved in corporate/government workshops for Laurie Kelly's Mindworks working with Mt Isa and Toowoomba TAFEs (presenting to Hospitality, Catering and Hairdressing teachers) as well as presenting on three occasions at large engineering companies on the topic of creative thinking. I was also honoured to be invited to present for Scholastic Australia, on the topic of cooperative thinking skills. These workshops occurred in Melbourne Sydney and Brisbane.

However the major focus and excitement in 2008 was working with Paul Herbert and Gerard Alford of ITC Publications. We three went to New Orleans for a week in March and presented workshops and had a display at the ASCD Conference in New Orleans. Where we promoted our USA version of the Innovative Teacher's Companion. The conference was huge and extremely well run, as one would expect in the USA. We lived in a gracious hotel, around the corner from Bourbon Street (thankfully it was not on Bourbon Street as the noise there never abated). New Orleans was wonderful, the food was superb, the history all pervasive and the spirit of the people was such that New Orleans is clearly recovering and reclaiming it's energy and contagious joie de vivre.

ITC Publications display at New Orleans, March 2008. From Left Eric Frangenheim, Mike Rogers from Everything About Learning (one of our distributors in USA), Gerard Alford and Paul Herbert.

The Innovative Teacher's Companion continues to play a large role in classrooms in Australia and New Zealand and the demand for our workshops in schools and universities is ever increasing. We have been invited to present 1-2 hour workshops in Universities in Brisbane, Toowoomba, Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast and Bundaberg to students preparing for the teaching profession. It is so exciting to see so many lecturers are valuing the use of critical, creative and co-operative thinking tools as part of the teacher training courses. Gerard and I were also honoured by being invited to present 75% of the fourth term course at Logan and Mt Gravatt Campus for Griffith University. Paul, Gerard and I have also presented at various conferences for principals, history teachers, commerce and business teachers and teachers in general in both Australia and New Zealand.

2009 is already filling up rapidly with five trips planned to New Zealand, three to West Australia, one to Singapore and two trips to the USA. The only question will my dodgy knee stay the course??