A programme that facilitates educators to discuss current education trends and issues titled Educator Sharing Network (ESN) were continued in 2008. Three sessions of TPSN, a free-of-charge and –most of the time– fully booked workshop which invites around 30 educators, took place on pre-determined Friday afternoons for two hours at SF TI Campus, Sampoerna Strategic Square, Jakarta. Until the end of March 2008, SF TI has successfully hosted 20 TPSN sessions in total. As an addition to SF TI’s own facilitators, Dewi Susanti, a lecturer and facilitator for creative thinking workshops, was also invited to lead a session in March.

– TPSN session on reading lead by Susilowaty (standing).

On January 25, around 30 people from different regions attended the 18th TPSN session which was entitled “Boosting the Culture of Reading Interest in Students.” The participants were not only teachers and principals but also parents who were genuinely concerned about the topic. There were even teachers from a Senior High School in Bandung who are deeply concerned about their students’ literacy rate. The moderator, Susilowaty, lead the session by discussing topics including participation of teacher and parents in reading activities, contributing facts to reading  problems  in students, and developing reading applicable reading programme. By the end of the session, participants agreed that  reading was very important to help students enrich their knowledge and prepare them for the future.

On 29 February 2008, SF TI conducted their second TPSN in 2008, attended by more than 30 teachers, featuring the topic “Teaching Strategies that Build Curiosity in Students.” Despite its name, the event was attended not only by teachers and principals, but also by curriculum coordinators and representatives from various foundations that are concerned with the field of education. Nana Suryana, acting as moderator, opened the discussion by a red herring: explaining about theory of electricity in order to show monotonous lectures versus more interesting approaches to build curiosity in students.  By the end of the sessions participants produced six practical demonstrations on interesting teaching methods applied in their own schools.

The TPSN theme for March 14, 2008 was "Solving Problems Visually: Why and How?" facilitated by Dewi Susanti, a freelance writer, researcher, and education consultant. In this session which was attended by no less than thirty participants of various professions discussing the use of visual language such as pictures, diagrams, visual aids, etc. which has seen an increase of usage in modern education systems. Also a popular term, as of late, is visual thinking as well as visual problem solving. Participants were engaged in games such as writing short stories in Mandarin—using Chinese characters, guessing the complete pictures out of partial images, and the mapping of the thinking process. Participants also engaged in group work in discussing different strategies of using visual language in teaching the concept of time, identifying car parts, and the learning of prefixes in the English language.