- The Friday Mindset
- Posts
- Friday Mindset #145
Happy Friday fellow travellers.
Half-term beckons, and with it, monumental piles of unmarked work. But let’s forget that for a moment and imagine instead nine days of nirvana. Weak Spring sunshine warming your face. Birdsong and snowdrops. Three fizzy lagers, dry roasted peanuts and a trip to the flicks to see Flight Risk. (IMDB has it as 5.5 which is preposterous nonsense. It’s a 9, no messing.)
But before you pull a calf-muscle sprinting to your car such is your eagerness to get the hell out of Dodge, let’s take a second. We’ve got some stuff to share with you…. and a book to give away!
Let’s dive in.
Something to try...
A podcast episode this week. Back in the Autumn, the splendid guys at Edufuturists invited Martin to chat on their podcast - which, by the way, has over three-hundred fascinating episodes. (This one, in which mathematician Mark McCourt explores curriculum design, made a big impression on us a few years ago. Start at 5:30, go through to 9:30. We liked his observation about teachers who fret, “I have to get through the curriculum!” as if it’s a conveyor belt, rather than conceiving of a curriculum as an interconnected web of ideas.)
Anyway, Martin is nowhere near as erudite, but has a good go at exploring some key ideas about non-cognitive skills and their impact on student progress. The episode came out last year, and ever since, we’ve been trying to find a spot for it in the newsletter - a combination of eagerness to share other things, and Martin’s bashful embarrassment, have conspired to delay us!
Fancy dipping in? The chapters are as follows: 02:06 Understanding Mindset in Education. 05:14 The Importance of Psychological Components. 09:28 Building Resilience in Students. 14:26 The Jigsaw Analogy for Learning. 18:58 Exploring the VESPA Framework. 20:11 Vision and Motivation in Education. 25:06 Approach vs. Avoidance Goals. 30:53 The Role of Systems in Education. 34:22 The Impact of Attention and Attitude. 39:16 The Influence of Parental Mindset. 52:27 Quickfire Questions and Conclusion
If you’re just going to pop in for a quick listen, why not try ‘Vision and Motivation in Education’ at the 20-minute mark:
Something we're reading...
A paper about the impact of AI on student learning has been on the TBR recently. It’s not been an easy read - it’s extensive and at times pretty dense, so we’ve tried to go though and select some of the more important bits for you.
In the full paper, you can read about how the researchers put Maths students through three phases of learning:
In phase one, the students attend a revision class where a teacher goes through a concept, with worked examples on the board.
In phase two, the students are split into groups. One group revise alone with pen, paper and textbook. One group revise alone with a specially adapted version of Chat GPT to help them. They students are practising solving problems in this phase, and their scores are collected. (Guess which group’s scores are better!)
In phase three, students then take a closed-book, unassisted exam, and their results are compared. (Guess which group’s results are better!)
If you’ve not got time for guessing-games and you want to know what happens, check out our hugely truncated but hopefully useful summary here:
Our latest offer...
Well, there’s always our upcoming 45 minute Zoom on effective target setting. We’re online at: 3:45pm on Thursday 27th of February, and it’s a repeat of the one we did back on December 4th. Here’s the link, one last time:
Meeting ID: 852 9424 4530 Passcode: 670707
But - yawn - you probably already know about the Zoom session so what else is there?
Here’s a little extra - we’ve got a copy of The GCSE Mindset to post to a lucky winner! It’s brand-new, folks, a duplicate copy from a recent school visit and therefore… we’re giving it away for nowt to the first person who gets in touch via the [email protected] email and leaves us a school address to post it to.
A thrilling conclusion to this half-term’s newsletters, I’m sure you’ll agree.
One last thing…
This newsletter is the 100% hand-typed output of three real people.
We toggle every AI co-pilot setting to ‘off’, do everything ourselves, and say no to every eager advertiser of mattresses or micro-dosed mushrooms. But, every now and again, to cover the cost of books and postage, we’ll ask if you wouldn’t mind buying us a coffee. If you’re enjoying our work or finding anything useful, why not sling us a hot drink.
Cheers!
Right, now you can pull a muscle in the sprint to the car. Go, go, go!
All the best to you and yours,
Steve, Martin and Tony
p.s. Artist and writer Austin Kleon loves February. Why? Because, he says, it’s a clean and neat 28 days - precisely 4 weeks - for improving a skill; an experiment in which we can track practice, measure progress and celebrate outcomes.
Here’s his February ‘practice calendar’:
Reply