Friday Mindset #131

It’s Friday at last!

Man, are we glad to have made it to the final one of September. The season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and cynically-flogged low-grade Pumpkin Spice Lattes is upon us.

So let’s dive in - we’ve lots of goodies for you this week 😁

Something to try...

We’re regularly asked to do presentations for parents. It’s not often something we have time for, but when we do, we really enjoy it; usually tacked on to the end of a day of student sessions. More recently, we’ve recorded a number of video versions of these parent presentations, handy when a school is so far away from our Manchester base that travelling to deliver the session in person wouldn’t be cost-effective.

Here’s a short extract - about 3-and-a-half minutes or so - from one of those sessions, presented by Martin. He’s discussing Cornell Notes as a note-taking methodology with a strong evidence-base to support its impact, and he’s doing it for a group of parents a few days after he’s spoken to the kids, thus references like, “I mentioned to your sons and daughters…” etc.

If you fancy going deep, the study Martin refers to is from the work of Kenneth Kiewra, and can be found on page 4 here:

And a brief extract from Martin’s presentation can be downloaded here:

Hope you find it useful!

Something we're reading...

We’ve been impressed with the no-nonsense straight-talking of this piece by Mark Manson. He doesn’t hold back, and that means some robust language - which you’d expect, we guess, from the guy who wrote this bestseller. We’re talking some serious f-bombs throughout. But that’s OK, because we’ve got a PG-rated word version for you too.

The article’s simply called How to Change Your Life - so we’re talking vision, effort and habit-formation here. It could be a great tutor-group read. For the unadulterated version, click below:

For our classroom-friendly word doc, all swears removed, click here:

Portal Talk...

We’ve got every activity from The VESPA Handbook available as a powerpoint presentation as part of the resources that come with a subscription to the online materials. Here’s one that didn’t appear in the book… but has ended up being an activity we’ve enjoyed delivering nevertheless.

It’s a vision activity called Six Types of Goal. It explores the idea that approach goals - travelling towards an imagined positive outcome - motivate students more effectively than avoidance goals - travelling away from an imagined negative outcome.

We’ve worked with lots of students who default to avoidance goals (“Just as long as I don’t fail, I’ll be happy”), and we wanted to encourage a more aspirational posture during the goal-setting process.

This is a beta-version, a little scrappy here and there, but pretty close to finished, and nice and easy to deliver. Hope you enjoy it!

Our latest offer...

We’ve championed the advice given by non-profit 80,000 Hours before - there’s a treasure trove of support for students who are beginning to think about the careers that might best improve the world, with data, graphic organisers, mini-essays, case studies and more for them to consider.

There’s a book too - co-founder Benjamin Todd’s 80,000 Hours - Find a Fulfilling Career That Does Good. We’ve gone through it cover-to-cover, so it’s time for us to give it away to someone else and spread the info within. Best suited to aspiring students at 11, 12 and 13, we reckon, and a great read.

Hit us up at [email protected] with an address if you’d like to win. First person to do so today gets it!

And that’s it for now. Throw an armful of marking into your roll-top backpack, leg it in the direction of your Dacia Duster and wheel-spin yourself off the premises. Hell, maybe even drop into Starbucks for a cynically-flogged low-grade Pumpkin Spice Latte on your way home. All the best to you and yours,

Steve, Tony and Martin

p.s. we send each other quotes that have struck a chord. Here’s an excerpt from one of our exchanges - a Charles Bukowski quote that speaks to the ‘pick yourself’ ethos we’ve been exploring with students: