Friday Mindset #127: School's Out

Happy Friday fellow travellers!

Yes, it’s only July 5th. Yes there are still two weeks to go for most of you…two-and-a-half for us. But readers in Scotland are off enjoying the - ahem - sunshine, and independent schools are shuttering their tuckshops for the summer, so it’s kind-of winding up and we’re knackered… all of which preamble explains this will be the last edition until Friday 6th September.

New subscribers - this is basically all you’re getting for eight weeks, which is a poor return on clicking a link, eh. Dry your eyes everyone, you’re just going to have to learn to live without us for a little while.

So, what have we got for you this final edition of the year?

A kind of cobbled-together best-of ‘23-’24; four of the resources and ideas we’ve shared that seem to have been the absolute gamechangers. If - that is - the game in question involves ‘avoiding personal abuse and receiving a modest number of complimentary emails.’ 😬

OK, let’s dive in.

This year we…

…geeked out about attention management

Whenever we walk into school or college and see the familiar campus laid out around us just like any other day… we’re not really seeing it all. Our attentional spotlight means we’re filtering visual information, simplifying the world around us.

What we choose to filter and choose to keep, makes up our reality. In this presentation, we were eager to share this idea with students, and show how we can see the world more optimistically, look for positives, change our posture, see possibilities rather than challenges.

There’s three videos here, each one worthy of further discussion…

…we got deep into goal-theory

During a focus group with students this year, some refused to set any goals about what GCSE grades they wanted. “As long as I pass I don’t care”, one kid told us. So we began researching why a proportion were happy to be precise (“An 8 in Maths, two 7s in English…”) and others just couldn’t do it.

The result, after a lot of reading, was a section of the new book, and a powerpoint we’ve been using ever since, exploring ‘approach goals’ and ‘avoidance goals’.

…we tried to suppress perfectionism

…by exploring a study that found deliberately making errors while note-taking led to better retention of information.

This one went down really well during training sessions. Try it!

…we once again saw how study-space has a huge impact on performance

It’s fast becoming one of the first things we’re telling students. The location and environment you choose to work in will affect your grade. Decisions you make in September become habits, and inefficiencies accumulate until you’re a grade or two grades behind your peers… all because of your levels of focus and concentration.

Choose your study spaces with the care you might choose your university course, your job, or hell, your prom outfit.

There we go, friends. Who knows what will snag our attention over the summer or what we’ll be geeking-out about next year, but we hope you stick around and keep reading.

We don’t go on about subscriber numbers or comments on here… that said, we’re about to 😂 There are over a thousand of you that read almost immediately at 3:20pm each Friday, and we’re very, very grateful for it! Thanks for staying with us.

Have a great summer. Rest-up and recharge, read good books, eat artisan ice-cream. Sunbathe somewhere, and enjoy a fancy continental lager that’s had the foam neatly removed with a bartender’s paddle. We’ll see you next academic year, fired-up and fresh and ready to go!

All the best to you and yours,

Martin, Steve and Tony

p.s. If you’ve enjoyed our new book, you could reeeally help us out by leaving a review. We’d appreciate it so much…

p.p. s. fancy a blistering summer read? Perhaps one featuring a documentary film crew trapped on a remote island and pursued by a shadowy killer? And you want it out on August 1st in hardback, you say?

Martin’s got you covered: