Friday Mindset #152

Happy Friday!

Let’s start the weekend with a cracking quote from the great Richard Feynman:

Lovely stuff. One for a classroom, or to pin over a desk. (btw we swear, honest to goodness, that our concept of ‘be’ goals versus ‘do’ goals was conceived entirely independently of Feynman…)

OK, that done, let’s get moving. Lots to share this week!

Something to try...

It’s revision season, and we’re sharing all kinds of useful tips and tricks in our student sessions, and with the students we’re currently working with.

Here’s a great powerpoint to use with any classes preparing for exams. It’s nothing revolutionary - it’s just an introduction to working in sprints. But year after year we find it’s a great foundational strategy that helps students get started, beat distraction, and work without procrastinating. So every year we go big on it!

There are three lovely short clips for you in the video - they might be familiar - and a planning exercise to do at the end too, so this is perfect for an assembly, a revision session, a parent session, or a tutorial.

You might have to download in order to watch the clips. And, we discovered when a student pointed it out this week, there’s a spelling error. One for you to sort.

Enjoy!

Something we're reading...

An interesting study about actioning feedback this week. Almost a thousand high school students across 16 schools were taught a 90-minute lesson about effective transactional writing. Part-way through the lesson, they completed a 12-minute written task that was auto-marked. The students then had to revise and improve their writing in line with the AI feedback they had received.

Researchers were interested in:

• What percentage of students engaged with feedback at all.

• What percentage made changes in line with feedback that subsequently improved their work

• What percentage made changes that had no, or a negative impact, on the quality of their work.

The findings are interesting, particularly given the feedback is auto-generated. We’ve got a hunch feedback works partly because it a person-to-person process, a dialogue characterised by care and connection. Do kids respond well to AI-generated advice? Um, not so much. The study includes this gem, for example: students with lower initial grades are less likely to engage with feedback.

The paper’s really easy to navigate, with hyperlinks down the side so you can skip to the relevant bits. Here you go:

Our latest offer...

Bit of a curveball this week. Might not be of interest.

Martin’s novel The Last Visitor got its US release a few weeks ago. Most of the reviews are behind paywalls but The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times were very nice about it. The Washington Post had issues by hey, you can’t win ‘em all 😂 Anyway, Martin’s US publishers recently sent him a lovely box of books…

…so he thought he’d give a few away.

Fancy a “stylishly written white-knuckler, which culminates in a breathtaking abandoned-lighthouse sequence”? (Wall Street Journal) And do you want it for free? If so, just email [email protected]. First four emails to land get a copy.

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 mushroom tea or CBD gummies. 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.

If nothing else, it’ll prevent us having to resort to advertising!

Cheers,

And that’s it for this week. Let’s put the victories and setbacks of the last five days behind us and get out into the sunshine at last. Have a good one.

All the best to you and yours,

Tony, Steve and Martin

p.s.

Like the US online press, The Times is also behind a paywall so we photographed this for you. It’s written by Sarah Jayne Blakemore - you might know her as the writer of The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain, a book we’ve given away to a newsletter reader before now - talking about positive messages to give to students during the stresses and strains of exam season.

Zoom in and you can read it. Decent stuff (if you can access it) for students and parents. We've already read it through with a year 9 class just to get them primed and thinking about KS4…