Friday Mindset #135

Happy Friday!

Some parish news. Steve’s back in the UK for the winter break soon, and we were talking about the possibility of running a small CPD session in person, so this is a chance to gauge potential interest. We’d run the session:

9:30-3:30, Monday 16th December, central Manchester (venue tbc)

and we’d cover independent learning, building aspiration, effective intervention, implementing change - basically, any elements of the VESPA model interesting to teachers or leaders at KS3, 4 or 5. There’d be a cost involved, since we’d need to hire a venue and cover catering, so you’d need approval from your CPD budget holder.

We’ll keep it small - say 10-12 places, so we can really get into discussion and sharing. Of interest? If so, let us know and we’ll try and set something up.

Right. Lots to share this week, let’s dive in:

Something to try...

In this wonderful paper, undergraduates at Anglia Ruskin, Cambridge’s second university, were asked to write a letter to their younger selves, reflecting on their first year of HE study, giving out the kind of advice they wished they’d had. You can go through the whole paper here:

The patterns academics spot from linguistic and structural analysis of the letters is fascinating; the similarities with the VESPA model too.

Here’s an example letter written by one of the students in the study. It’s a generous piece of writing - reflective and mature, a snapshot of someone growing and learning. It’s great to share with students in 12 and 13, and reading it through/discussing it, would make a really good tutorial session. Demystify university study!

Enjoy.

Something we're reading...

This piece in the TES is excellent. David Robson looks at a range of studies around error-making and its effect on learning. There are some really interesting studies referenced, including one we’ve shared with you before, and some new to us. It covers pre-testing, deliberate error-making, creative adjustment in light of errors, hypercorrection… plenty to get your teeth into, and written in a clear, engaging way.

Well worth fifteen minutes before you head home:

Portal Talk...

Today I wanted to share the first of two slide decks around environment design. This week we look at the ‘physical environment’, and next week we will share the slides for ‘digital environment.’ Why is this on our minds? Well, speaking to students across the country we have been surprised at the response when students were asked - ‘How often do you have access to a quiet and distraction free study space?’

The results have been consistent across many different schools and student demographics: around 45% of students only claim to have such access either ‘sometimes’, ‘rarely’ or ‘never’, 16% of students claiming to only have access either ‘rarely’ or ‘never’.

Something as fundamental as being able to study without distractions is crucial for the success of students. We’ve designed what we hope are some thought-provoking slides to help you start these conversations with students.

The results of our survey can be found in the slides, which are in the link below.

These will be accessible until 5th December, so go at it!

If you would like to learn more about our tutor resources, or the VESPA Coaching Portal, please get in touch at [email protected]. You can also schedule a quick meeting using the link below if you would like to learn more.

Our latest offer...

We’re going to be running a free online session this half-term!

We always enjoy these: 45 minute Zoom sessions where we cover some aspect or element of effective student support. We’ve done aspiration, effective revision, implementation of VESPA… this time we want to share some work we’ve been doing on effective target setting. It’s going to cover a lot of our recent work on coaching, intervention, and successful target-setting for students. This is way more than just ‘set SMART targets’, we’ve gone through a load of examples of staff-set targets for students to identify what we think might be best practice. In summary:

We’re online at: 3:45pm on Wednesday 4th of December

Covering: towards effective target setting for KS4 and 5 students

It’s going to be a Zoom session. If you’d like the link, just get in touch at [email protected], and we’ll send it through to you.

Fancy sending us a coffee? Click here if you’ve liked anything we’ve been sharing this year, and tip us a couple of quid or so:

Right, we’re done. Get out of here!

All the best to you and yours,

Martin, Steve and Tony