- The Friday Mindset
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- Friday Mindset #138
Happy Friday folks.
It’s the first weekend in December. The winter break is nearly here. Break out the pompous Sting album where he ruminates in a scarf and beard, pontificating about the psychic importance of the season. Always good for a laugh.
Right, let’s dive in.
Something to try...
More and more often we’re chatting with staff who are concerned with students’ levels of vision and proactivity. We see this in students we work with too – a kind of passive, shoulder-shrugging lack of agency. (A pandemic can do that to you. ‘What’s the point in trying to guide the direction of my life when everything is so random and unpredictable?’)
So a lot of the work we’ve been doing recently has been about changing culture. Those internal drivers aren’t as present in students as they used to be; we have to change the expectations and messages we transmit, so that students know that (i) success, happiness and fulfilment are possible (ii) they are still the result of proactive decisions and choices, not chance or fate and (iii) plenty of others have achieved amazing things before them – the paths are well lit.
Here’s a great example of what we mean. This powerpoint tells the story of Maya Shankar’s audition at the Julliard in New York – one of the world’s top ten conservatoires. And she didn’t get the audition the regular way.
She just walked in with her mum.
As an example of proactive curiosity and courage, it’s a great powerpoint to share with students at key stage 4 and 5:
Something we're reading...
This week, it’s time for a study we’ve referenced in an upcoming book, The Backpacker’s Guide to University. It’s a new study on the effectiveness of Cornell notes, and it’s a belter. Academics at New York State’s Buffalo University studied the effects of note-taking techniques on test scores. Students were taught new information in a Social Studies class, but took notes in different ways during the lesson.
Group one took no notes at all.
Group two took notes in whatever way they usually did. (None of these students used the Cornell technique. We’ll call this group ‘standard notes.’)
Group three took Cornell notes, typing them digitally. They completed the additional column as they went along, not later.
Group Four took handwritten Cornell notes, again completing the additional column as they went along rather than later.
Then the students all took the same comprehension test. The mean score achieved by the students was 7.2 out of 10. The lowest score was 2, and the highest, 10. The researchers looked at the average scores achieved by the four groups. Here’s what they found:
Group | Average student score as % |
Group One: took no notes | 58.7% |
Group two: took ‘standard notes’ | 70.1% |
Group three: Cornell notes, typed digitally | 76.1% |
Group Four: Cornell notes, handwritten | 78.7% |
And that wasn’t all. Just before taking the test, the groups were asked to fill out a questionnaire asking them how well prepared they felt, scoring themselves on a 1-5 scale. Group four, the handwritten Cornell notes group, were already feeling good; 56% of students scored themselves a 4 or 5. In group three, another Cornell notes group, 50% scored 4 or 5. Then the scores drop. Group two, the standard notes group, had 45% of its members feeling positive. Unsurprisingly in group one, who hadn’t taken any notes, 13% scored themselves 4 or 5.
Our latest offer...
A final dip into Steve’s attic this week!
Remember he discovered a box of books we’d acquired on publication but never shared, gathering dust in his roof? We’ve been giving them away for free on-and-off over the course of this term, so as it begins to draw to a close, we thought we’d finish off the remains of the cache.
We have three copies of The GCSE Mindset to give away this time. We’ll do it in the usual way - the first folks to email us at [email protected] and leave a school/college address get them posted free as soon as we can find a moment. The bulk of the traffic tends to happen between 3:20 and 3:50pm - depending upon the relative obscurity of the book on offer - so if you’re reading this in the window, drop us an email, you never know.
And if you miss out - why not treat yourself to an - ahem - award-winning book?
Christmas markets, seasonally-syruped lattes, panic-bought socks and Whamageddon. Absolute scenes, folks. Absolute scenes.
All the best to you and yours,
Tony, Steve and Martin