Friday Mindset #134

Happy Friday folks, half term is here!

(Sorry to colleagues in Wales, who have another week to go, perhaps others whose LA sets a different half term date…) After today’s issue, we’ll be taking a little time off and coming back in a couple of Fridays’ time.

But we’ve got a bunch of stuff for you to be playing with this week. Half-term works as such a clear temporal checkpoint, we’ve themed some of today’s activities around reflection and fresh starts. Hope it’s useful stuff for you.

Let’s dive in…

Something to try...

Every now and again we’ll run an activity where students reflect on the study challenges they’ve faced so far, analysing what’s been particularly unexpected. It’s often a good one to do as a half-term comes to a close, and today we’ve got a slightly different take on it for you.

In this session, students make sense of the challenges they’ve faced by reorganising and reframing them as advice for someone else. This helps objectively examine the aspects of study they’ve found difficult. Of course they end up advising themselves… but keep the advice they produce and save it for next year’s students, or show it back to the writers themselves in another term’s time to see if they’re following it!

Here’s your powerpoint, complete with a clip from Young Sheldon to set the scene, and a great video in which people of all ages give advice to their younger selves.

Enjoy!

Something we're reading...

More from the upcoming Backpacker’s Guide to University this week. This is one of the book’s ‘research corner’ sections. It’s a paper about making fresh starts - we wanted to share it this week because with half term on the horizon, we’ve got an opportunity to harness a fresh-start-moment with those students who might not have started the year as well as we - or they - hoped.

There’s a summary, and then the paper itself for you to check out:

“Often it can feel very hard to change our behaviours, particularly if comfortable habits have established themselves over time. It’s a very human thing to try to change but fail. One interesting piece of research suggests that goal-motivation – how committed we feel to changing our behaviour and pursuing a new goal like quitting smoking, losing weight or studying differently – can often be much stronger if we attach some importance to the day we begin.

In one study, for example, participants were asked to set themselves a goal. Every participant chose something personal to them that they really wanted to change, such as their levels of organisation or the amount of effort they put into their studies.

One group were assigned a start date for their new goal: March 20^th.

The other group were given the same date to begin, but the start date was expressed as March 20^th – the first day of Spring.

Which group showed higher levels of goal-motivation? The participants who were given this extra information about the significance of the date. Suddenly, the day was powerful, important, and loaded with positive meaning for them. You can do the same too. If you’re trying to change the way you work, instead of just choosing a random date in the near future and hoping for the best, find a way of attaching meaning to the date. It could be… the first day of a season, the first of a semester, the 50^th day since term started, a half-birthday, a parents or sibling’s birthday, an important day in history…

If you find a way of making the date meaningful, you’re much more likely to make change stick.”

Portal Talk...

This week, we wanted to send a huge thank you to Mr John Thomlinson at St Bede’s and St Joseph’s Catholic College, Bradford, who has created a superb user guide for tutors using the coaching portal. John has kindly let us share this below.

We hope other teams find this guide useful too - it’s clear, visual and simple to follow. Cheers, John!

Our latest offer...

We’ve got a free five-minute video for you. In keeping with the theme of the newsletter, it’s all about making fresh starts. This is Martin delivering a session covering the attention economy, and professor Richard Wiseman’s work on luck:

And staying with Martin, there’s always this. After all, it’s his last chance to bend your ear about his new novel The Last Visitor (‘inventive’ ‘thrilling’ ‘glistens with menace’) which is one of October’s Kindle Monthly Deals - 99p in ebook:

And that’s it for this half term. Like you, we’re absolutely knackered. Time to get off home. Enjoy your well-earned nine-dayer. All the best to you and yours,

Tony, Steve and Martin