Friday Mindset #157

Happy Friday, folks.

Another week bites the dust. Summer’s so close we can taste it in the air. The end of exams, the days of wine and roses, the sunscreen, the beach towels and the airport novels featuring skulduggery in glamorous places*

Before all that, though, two important notices!

1. Regular Announcement:

To keep this show on the road, we’re changing to a subscription model. If you do nothing, you’ll still get Something we’re Reading and Portal Talk as usual, but the other two features, Something to Try and Our Latest Offer, will only be available to paid subscribers.

Each issue takes us between three and four hours to complete and we’ve done nearly 160 free issues, so if we’re to keep the project going as we want to, we need a number of paid subscribers per month. The price will be very reasonable, about the cost of a coffee, and it’ll mean we can keep doing the work; that’s 32 newsletters per academic year as usual.

Full subscription details to follow next week.

OK. Still got four totally free, old-school issues to come, all the way through to July 11th. So let’s enjoy them. First up:

2. Training Day news…

We’re hoping we can get a small group of you together for a day of ideas, discussion and presentation:

VESPA training day with Steve, Martin and Tony, Tuesday 15th July, Central Manchester, 9:30am-3:30pm

We’ll cover whatever you want, but if we don’t have specific suggestions, it’ll be: (i) building engagement and aspiration, (ii) raising levels of effort, (iii) evidence-based revision strategies, (iv) effective coaching and intervention, (v) implementing VESPA.

Here’s the Eventbrite page if you’re interested:

The madness is beginning to ease, so it’s a great time to decompress and do some thinking. Come and join us!

OK, and now onto the rest.

Something we're Reading...

We got really excited about the paper we’re sharing below. Why? Because in The GCSE Mindset we’ve got a vision activity called ‘Problem, Not Job’ which requires students to focus on the kinds of problems they see in the world and want to dedicate themselves to solving. Goals that are based on problems that need solving require students to think about practical steps and actions - they’re ‘do’ goals rather than just ‘be’ goals.

We knew when we wrote the activity that a really effective way to engage students in setting ‘do’ goals was encouraging them to think about what their courses were for. (Why do we study Biology? What’s the point in a History GCSE?) Kids who’d thought this through were more engaged, more motivated, more committed.

At the time, it was an observation we’d made in our own context. Now there’s the research to prove it.

Turns out what we were advocating back in 2017 is called a ‘Utility-Value Intervention’. From the paper: “Utility-value interventions (UVIs) help students discover and reflect on the usefulness and value of course topics for themselves through writing assignments [in which they] are instructed to explore the personal usefulness (i.e., utility value) of course material and discuss its relevance for their own lives or the lives of close others. Students can connect course material to whatever is important to them, which allows them to connect course topics to their interests, their future goals, and others (e.g., their family, community, or society) as they reflect on what they are learning.”

The UVI didn’t increase students’ enjoyment of a course but it did increase their persistence with it, and had an impact on their likelihood to major in that course later (it’s an American study).

So we’re going to try and put together an activity that helps you structure a UVI for your own course. That’s to come. In the meantime, here’s the paper itself. It’s a good read:

Something to try…

Two weeks ago we shared this podcast:

Immediately afterwards, Andy got it touch (thanks Andy!) to say he’d listened to it back when it was broadcast, and already communicated its central idea to students. He’s way ahead of the game is Andy. He picked the same key idea from the show that we did: that when we plan to do challenging things, we plan for our perfect future selves working in ideal conditions. But that’s not how life works. Instead of perfect conditions, we find ourselves plagued by distractions. Instead of our best selves, we find we’re flawed people who make bad decisions.

Here’s how Andy put it to his students:

“Will Power

I listened to a podcast yesterday on will power (at the same time as eating a full bag of Starburst on my drive home ☹ I’m only human!).  That said, I took something useful from it. They discussed making plans, something really relevant to you all with revision.  They mentioned that when we put plans in place, set ourselves targets, look to map out our future actions for success, we always plan for the best days.  The best days are days when it’s easy to get things done, the days when all conditions are optimal in terms of getting stuck in. The podcaster suggested that willpower isn’t really a real concept, that on some days we just have more barriers in the way than others. 

Their advice struck a chord with me – ‘make sure you plan for the worst days’, if things don’t go to plan, what is the minimal that you’ll do?  This way you always get something done, there is always some progress.  If you took this concept and ran with it in terms of your revision you would always be moving forward – particularly useful for those of you feel you aren’t progressing with revision right now.”

Andy’s advice reminded us of an activity you might want to try. It’s called Pre-Made Decisions, and was originally shared in The GCSE Mindset.

It’s a great one to share with 9s, 10s, 12s or any exam group. Hope you find it useful! Here’s a recently tweaked version we’ve used:

Right, we’re done. Let’s lever the lid off a cold, cold beer. Or a Diet Coke. Maybe a fancy kombucha, your call.

All the best to you and yours,

Steve, Tony and Martin

p.s. Study after study shows the power of teaching someone else for improving understanding and recall. We’ve got activities about teaching someone else as a revision strategy in The GCSE Mindset and The VESPA Handbook.

But the phrase rubberducking - used in the tech world, we understand - was new to us.

The process is certainly adjacent. Programmers explain their problems out loud to a rubber duck. In the process of verbalising the issue, they hit upon a solution. This surely has study applicability…

*Skulduggery in Glamorous Places - cool name for a Substack newsletter. It’s yours.