Friday Mindset #159

Happy Friday!

We made it. Another week conquered. Not long to go now, and you’ll be unfurling a novelty towel on a rainswept beach, wondering where all the good weather went.

Anyway, let’s move on.

This is your penultimate full and free newsletter 😢 Woe! Next week we’ll do a celebratory best-of round-up, with the five most popular resources shared this year. Then we’re taking a break until Friday September 5th. And when we return, we’ll be running our subscription model, which looks like this:

The Subscription Upgrade Details

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.

If you do subscribe to the upgrade, 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, whatever p.s. we throw in, 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 upgrade cost: £5 per month, about £1.20 per week…. or a discounted £50 for the full year. (We hope this strikes you as reasonable - it takes us three hours each week to put one of these together!)

Here’s your button:

OK, let’s dive in - there’s something of a theme this week.

Something we're Reading...

As a culture, we’re in a bit of an AI frenzy at the moment. This job won’t exist, that job won’t exist…

Recently, Martin (with his thriller-writing hat on) was asked to talk to a group of aspiring fiction writers. One said, “Is there any point though? Won’t AI be writing fiction in the future?” Well, it’s writing it now, Martin told them. But no-one’s buying it. Bottom line is, no-one wants to dedicate time - their one non-renewable resource - to reading something constructed by a computer that’s guessing the next likely word based on the thousands of books its illegally stolen. All you get is bland meh.

Now we don’t want to come across as luddites. LLMs will have plenty of useful applications, and the world of work - and teaching - will change as a result. But radio, TV and streaming all co-exist despite predictions that each would replace the other, so it’s important we’re measured and balanced in the messages we give to students. The last thing this generation need is yet more uncertainty.

So here’s one to read with KS4 and 5 groups. It’s short, engaging, and interesting to discuss:

It goes without saying, the website’s a technicolour nightmare of crappy adverts - what isn’t nowadays?* - so here’s the word version:

Something to try...

We were delivering a session on Developing a Culture of Independent Learning at an 11-18 school recently (get in touch at [email protected] if that sounds like the sort of thing your organisation needs), and we’d reached a section where staff were reflecting on the progress they’d made so far.

One staff member had real concerns about students using AI to avoid working independently. We talked it through for a few minutes, and shared a crucial educational principle we often return to: whoever does the thinking gets the learning. 

That reminded us we have a couple of decent clips in a presentation to share on this exact topic. We hadn’t brought it along to that particular gig, ‘…but it’s good stuff for the newsletter’, we thought to ourselves. So we dug it out to share, and here it is.

All students need to see this, but particularly those doing level 3 qualifications. As well as their parents!

Our latest offer...

Martin’s new book (co-written with The University of Sheffield’s Dr Jo Phillips) is coming out this August.

It’s perfect for Year 13 students preparing for life at university - with loads on what to expect from H.E. study, emphasising independent learning and proactivity. Great for year 13s who can begin to try out some of the suggestions right now while they’re still with you, that way you get to see the benefits!

And the publishers have arranged a 25% discount for pre-orders. Until the end of July, the code STUDENT25 will give you a discount at checkout! Click the caption below, to claim yours…

And that’s it for this week, folks. Next week, it’s our best-of 2024-25, then it’s collapse-in-an-exhausted-heap time! Time to dig out those novelty towels. All the best to you and yours,

Steve, Martin and Tony

p.s.

We love this; good to share with students overly-concerned with how others might perceive them. Forget it. ‘Nobody is thinking about you.’ Liberation!

Great for a classroom wall, a tutorial or assembly, a regular reminder to students or, indeed, yourself…

p.p.s.

One to embroider on your beach towel folks…

*that really does sound a bit Luddite-y doesn’t it