Friday Mindset #129

Happy Friday fellow warriors.

For five days the combat has raged but for now, our battles are ended, and we can all sheathe our weapons, set aside our armour, and drink mead around the fire whilst… oh, forget it. What a tedious metaphor.

So, what have we got for you this week? A free powerpoint about vision, a great read about retrieval practice, a request to contribute to a possible book, and another dip into Steve’s attic for freebies!

Hard to beat that on a Friday, we reckon. Let’s dive in…

Something to try...

OK - vision.

This is the time of year we’re trying to fire-up 11s, 12s and 13s - really get them feeling positive about the year ahead, and gaining clarity on what they’re trying to achieve and what success might look like for them.

But not all students find motivating themselves easy. Having spoken to a whole load of students over the last week or two, we’ve reflected… and gone deep on what makes motivated students different, pulling together two ideas that have struck us as useful. You might have heard us go on about episodic future thinking, for example - here we pair it with a phrase that we consider more helpful - the idea of ‘cognitive maps’; that is, vivid, visual maps of possible futures that allow us to regularly ‘visit’ these futures.

Motivated students (not to mention students with higher cultural capital and a broader range of life experience) have better cognitive maps. Here’s a powerpoint for you - it has a year 13 focus, but if you download and adjust, it could work equally well in year 12 or key stage 4. Enjoy!

Something we're reading...

We’ve recently stumbled across the work of Zac Highley. Highley’s a doctor in Boston, and - how shall we put this? - ‘a bit of a card’. Yeah. A joker, a personality… just a few minutes on his website will give you a sense of his self-deprecating humour and addiction to self-promotion and hustle-culture. He writes about study, mostly with a focus on medicine, and like a lot of Youtubing medics, he seems to be pretty much sponsored by Anki, the flashcard-building folks.

Set all that aside, though. This article has been a really interesting read: the snappily-titled Why Most People are Using Active Recall All Wrong. There are some genuinely useful observations, and flippant as he is, he at least tries to reference his work. If nothing else, it might persuade your aspiring medics to work a little more effectively.

Worth checking out for that alone.

A Request...

Martin’s currently co-authoring a book called The Backpacker’s Guide to University. In it, he’s using the metaphor of a successful learner being a backpacker (agile, creative, in charge of their own direction and destiny) as opposed to a tourist (a passive consumer reliant on a handy tour guide to do all the difficult stuff for them.)

Scattered throughout the book, he’d like brief, anonymised entries called Confessions of a Backpacker. These will be real-life stories/ discoveries/observations/realisations from real people’s time at university. They can be hacks, tactics, epiphanies, or embarrassing disasters, about five sentences long - up to seventy words - and should look like this (which is Martin’s):

“Each time I took cash out of an ATM to go on a night out, the little screen would show my remaining balance. I was delighted to discover that the more money I took out, the higher my remaining balance. Amazing! It was ages before I saw the minus sign in front of the figure, and realised I was actually going deeper and deeper into debt.”

Yeah. Martin was a dumb kid. Anyway, if you want to contribute, simply email [email protected] with your summary, and he’ll anonymise it and see if he can get it to fit in the book somewhere.

Thanks so much👍

Our latest offer... The ‘Steve’s Attic’ Bonanza Part 2!

Readers of last week’s newsletter will know that over the summer, Steve was back in the UK and clearing out his attic, where he found a box of our books he’d forgotten about. So we’ve got three brand new copies of The GCSE Mindset to give away this week.

It’s very simple. Just like last week (well done to the lucky winners… we’re ignoring you guys this time around so you don’t hog the limelight!) if you’re amongst the first three people to email us right now at [email protected], and leave your school address, we’ll post them out to you as a little pressie! This newsletter lands at 3:20pm on September 13th, and we imagine by 3:45pm, we’ll have our winners. So if you’re reading this and the window is still open - drop us a line!

Part 3 coming next week and who knows, maybe part 4 after that.

OK, we’re done and dusted for this week, folks. Back to that fire for another tankard of mead. All the best to you and yours,

Steve, Tony and Martin

p.s. we would love you to give a star-rating to The VESPA Handbook if you’re finding it useful. Just a quick review can help immensely. As long as it’s a good one, OK? 😁