Friday Mindset #158

Happy Friday!

Right, it’s time. Here we go -

The Subscription Details

First, if you don’t subscribe and stay as you are, you’ll get:

32 partial issues of The Friday Mindset each academic year. You’ll be able to read and download resources from Something we’re Reading and Portal Talk. We know payment won’t suit a large number of you, so we’ll put just as much into the free stuff every week as we always have.

But if you do subscribe, you’ll get:

32 complete issues of The Friday Mindset each academic year. You’ll be able to read and download resources from Something we’re Reading, Portal Talk, Something to Try and Our Latest Offer, as well as… (i) access to our bank of video resources (so good for presentations, assemblies, tutorial ideas) and (ii) an additional issue, our Summer Reading Suggestions, each August.

The subscription cost: £5 per month, about £1.20 per week. But we’re planning a discount if you pay for a year up front.

OK. You’ve still got three totally free, old-school issues including today’s, so let’s dive in and enjoy them.

Something we're Reading...

Right, so this paper is very interesting. It’s a research piece exploring the results of a meta-analysis (32 research papers) of UK schools post-primary, looking at whether selection at age 11 leads to better academic achievement. Bit of context: there are 163 grammar schools in England - but they’re unevenly distributed, which means not all students have access to them. Happy days if you want a grammar and live in Kent or Buckinghamshire, bad news if you’re in Tyneside.

Turns out there are plenty of studies that disagree with each other, some saying selective education leads to better outcomes for those selected, others saying there’s no difference.

So this paper uses controls, removing “student and school characteristics” to see if, beneath all the variables, selective education offers better outcomes, and to see if intergenerational social mobility is promoted by one system or the other.

Scroll down to ‘impact of selective education on educational outcomes’ - about half-way down - to get the results. There’s interesting stuff on participation in HE, earnings, and socio-emotional outcomes.

Well worth a read, wherever you happen to work.

Portal Talk...

As mentioned above, something we’ll be adding for all subscribers to the newsletter is a brand new resource called VESPA VIDEOS. It’s our very own curated collection of videos which will be updated every time we find new and interesting ones. You can search by VESPA category or even by a particular study problem you may wish to address.

No more trawling through back issues of the newsletter to find one of Martin’s obscure research videos - they’ll all be here, in a quick and easy-to-navigate site. Which means we’ll have to trawl through all the back issues to find Martin’s obscure research videos 😢

It’s still in its BETA testing stage and they’re not all present and correct yet, but you can get a taster and check it out here:

Also the new website is now live! You can try out the VESPA Questionnaire and get sent a report directly to your email, book training or INSET with Martin, or Student Sessions with Tony, and even browse our shop. Have a play around:

If you would like to learn more about how the VESPA Coaching portal can be used in your school. Please book in a free demo using the link below:

Something to Try...

Last week we got geekily excited about a paper which suggested that utility-value interventions - that is, interventions that encourage students to reflect on and record ideas about why a subject is important and how it impacts others’ lives - led to greater commitment and persistence in that subject. The impact is at its greatest among students from disadvantaged or under-represented backgrounds, too, which is of particular concern to us.

So can we design our own utility-value intervention?

Well, we went through the appendix of the study to find exactly what it was that students were asked to do. It was pretty simple, and we’ve turned it into a vision activity for you.

What you’ve got here is a two-page handout. The first page summarises the study. Page two asks students to discuss, reflect on, and record thoughts to five questions. We’ve adapted the questions from the study’s resources and they’re pretty similar, so should get students thinking about their personal ‘why’ for a particular subject choice.

Good for year 9s; this year’s 10; next year’s 11s, and your KS5 people too - let’s see if we can boost their feelings of engagement and persistence. Hope you find it useful!

Our latest offer...

Your regular reminder that 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

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

It’s such a great time of year to begin the decompression and do some thinking and planning. Come and join us!

And that’s it for this week you beautiful people.

All the best to you and yours,

Tony, Martin and Steve

p.s. One for a classroom wall, a corridor display, or even an assembly. As the old saying goes, we don’t write to share what we’re thinking, we write to discover what we’re thinking…