Friday Mindset #136

Happy Friday!

Twenty minutes ago, this building was teeming with life. Now, the only three people left are the site supervisor with the bad teeth and United tattoos, the hyper-enthusiastic RQT applying stickers to the bottom of immaculately-marked pieces of work before they go out on the town,

and you.

So brew up. Let’s dive in.

Something to try...

This week we’re diving into systems, with a very quick and easy summary of 15 different organisational tactics in one handy picture. Where did we get this from, you ask. No idea. It’s sitting in a saved-folder-of-interesting-stuff with no reference attached to it. Thanks to whoever put the work in and sorry we nicked it.

Looking down this list, we’re familiar with most of these approaches, and can see the influence of David Allen, Cal Newport, Steven Covey and others. We’re big on number 14 at the moment. Basically trying to pretend world politics doesn’t exist for a little while so we can get some work done. On which note - if you don’t know Forest, explore it. We use it a lot, with the rainfall noise particularly soothing, and we know a year 10 student who has completely bossed her schoolwork thanks to it.

Have a go at using this in a tutorial session - students could pick one to experiment with for a week…

Download a copy here.

Something we're reading...

A month or so ago, Daniel Pink shared an interesting paper on X, which we downloaded, read, lost, then found again. So here it (finally) is.

First, a few words. This is a study about attitude - world-view, essentially - and its impact on people’s happiness, success, positivity. It argues for the existence of ‘primals’, deep beliefs about the way they world works that transcend culture, religion etc. In the study, researchers correlate these primal beliefs against job success, life satisfaction, negative emotion and so on. There’s also a terrific section on the beliefs of parents.

Here’s the paper - short and very readable:

And we’ve made a powerpoint to go with it; a simple explanation for students, which encourages them to reflect on their own attitudes and beliefs. This’ll make an interesting tutorial session or assembly, we reckon.

Portal Talk...

Contain your excitement, but today we are giving you part two of the student environment design slides!!

Last week we looked at the importance of students considering their physical spaces when they are studying. However in many of our conversations with students we often find that they ignore, or passively accept, their digital environments.

Our poll shown below, repeated with hundreds of students across the UK, consistently shows that only 14% of students are able to control their phone use “Really Well”, while for 30% of students their phone is either “Always” a distraction, or they “Need help” with their phone use.

We have been showing students this clip of Cal Newport, Computer Scientist at MIT, to explains how their relationship with devices has impacted their ability to concentrate for longer periods of time, ie. when revising!

Our message is that perhaps some students have to accept that 2hrs of deep, highly focussed, work is beyond them until they can change their relationship with their devices, which might take time.

However all is not lost, because with clever use of 25min sprint activities, or the Pomodoro technique, students can plan effective revision sessions, utilising shorter highly focussed periods, interspersed with break periods.

Here are the slides to help you start these discussions with your own students…

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 la_test offer...

Two things. First, a heads-up. Martin is presenting a two-and-a-half hour session called The Exam Mindset - all about effective, evidenced-based revision techniques - on behalf of Bath Spa University. It’s happening on Tuesday 19th November - that’s next Tuesday - from 4:00-6:30pm. All the details are here:

And if you like your sessions free, a reminder: we’re going to be running a free online session this half-term!

This time around we want to share some work we’ve been doing on effective target setting. 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. Thanks to all those who’ve already been in touch!

Right, that’s us done. Queue up your Whitesnake playlist and head out to the Twingo. It’s time to get out of here.

All the best to you and yours,

Tony, Steve and Martin

p.s. The VESPA Handbook is ‘award-winning’! Have you got your copy yet?