Friday Mindset #137

It’s Friday!

We’d begin with a witty remark or amusing observation, but we’re just too damn tired so let’s do away with the flim-flam and dive right in.

Something to try...

True story from a few years back: we were working with two students - they were good friends - and we were trying to draw out their vision for the future, figure out what made the two of them tick and what success looked like for them. They both has the same answer: they wanted to be professional footballers.

Oh-kay…

We had hours of conversation about the two students as we tried to figure out what made their goal different from other’s. We went back and forth for a few years, long after these two had left us and moved on. (Turned out they had a dream not a goal - and there’s a big difference. Neither of them were even playing semi-pro.) We wrestled with questions like:

• Is it a problem to set a hugely ambitious goal?

• What role does luck play in likely success?

• Should all students have a ‘plan B’ for every goal they set?

• Would we be subconsciously suffocating student ambition if we poured water on a goal like this?

• What is a ‘realistic’ goal? If that’s a subjective value judgement, do we end up moderating student aspiration according to what we see as ‘realistic’?

• And could that be a function of geography or class? Would a fee-paying school in the south east also discourage their students like this?

• Are we part of the problem?

Anyway. Here’s our latest attempt at working with students who have ambitious goals. This time we’ve framed it in economic terms, having come across the idea of winner-takes-all job markets. We’ve leaned heavily on the work of Robert Frank here, but the stats are all ours… accurate at the time of writing.

It’s a cool presentation, even if we do say so ourselves, since the central idea is new to us. Economists will no doubt roll their eyes at our charming naivety…

Something we're reading…

Leaders, we love this article. Iranian-American academic Professor Serena Sohrab explores how successful teams work together to solve problems. She begins by outlining the four phases of problem-solving (five, if we include ‘chaos’, the last one!) and colour codes them like this:

Then she observes and compares high and low-performing teams as they try to solve problems, and maps (i) which phases they move through, (ii) when, and (iii) for how long. Here are the maps for five high performing teams:

And here are the same maps for five poorly-performing teams:

Geeky stuff. We love it. Here’s the full article in the Harvard Business Review:

Portal Talk...

We noticed that a couple of the links didn’t show up for everyone in last weeks newsletter, so I have added them below for you.

Part 2 of our study environment series, focussing on digital environment design, are also below:

Please get in touch if you would like to learn more about the VESPA Portal resources, or student coaching platform.

Our latest offer...

Final call for your free online session:

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

Covering: towards effective target setting for KS4 and 5 students

If you’d like the Zoom 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!

Go on then you can have your first mince pie now, its nearly December, see you next week!

All the best to you and yours,

Martin, Steve and Tony