Friday Mindset #163

Happy Friday!

What a three weeks. We’ve been running training with schools in the UK, Australia, two in Thailand, one in Hong Kong, and fielding requests from as far away as Nepal. Feels very weird to see VESPA travel so far. Anyway, the upshot is, we’re crackered 🥱

Re: staff CPD - we’re full until Christmas now, with the exception of a few online slots we might be able to crowbar in - but January is free and open, so have at it.

Re: student sessions - we always do our best to fit these in - say hello at [email protected] or fill in an online training request form on the website.

OK, we may be exhausted, but we’ve still got a whole bunch of stuff to share. Let’s dive in!

Something we're reading...

This week we’ve got a QTR… that’s Quick Tutorial Read for those of us in the know. It’s this powerful Adam Mastroianni article about, among other things, self-sabotage. The full article is a wide-ranging, darkly humorous dose of nihilism which begins, “Everyone I know has given up. The jig is up, the fix is in and the party’s over. Everything sucks…” 

(Not a cheerful start 🤣 but he’s a very good writer - there are plenty of neatly turned phrases like “the world’s gonna end in fascists and ashes.” )

So anyway we’ve edited the piece to focus in on the writing about self-sabotage in an academic context, which we really enjoyed reading and thinking about, and to emphasise Mastroianni’s much more hopeful conclusion.

If the darkness of the full piece is singing its siren song, follow the link below:

But we’ll be going for the truncated version. If you fancy joining us, in the next link we’ve done some trimming, re-titled the piece, and dropped the result into Word for you:

Portal Talk... Case Study - a VESPA Questionnaire Report

We’ve been enjoying doing this, so we’re at it again. The three of us sat down to discuss a real, anonymised VESPA report…

Martin: This one’s interesting. A student who’s hard working, according to the effort score, effective and efficient exam preparation according to the practice score… but look at that much lower attitude score. Often when attitude is low, students are down on themselves across the board, but not here.

Tony: So - perfectionism? Could be a case of checking what the student’s written in the comment box.

Steve: I was just about to suggest the same thing…

Steve: There you go. Isn’t it revealing? Great comment, real sense of developing self-awareness. There’s some work to do with this student on attitude, introducing the idea that ‘mistakes are information’. It’s going to be the mark at the end of the course that matters, not those awarded in the interim.

Martin: Perhaps they need to move away from performance goals towards mastery goals - look at that ‘not being as good as others’ comment.

Something to try...

We’ve got a helpful resource for better coaching conversations for you today.

Or to be more accurate, three resources 😍

They’re specifically for the middle of your coaching conversation - the point where diagnosis is over, it’s clear where the student is succeeding and where they’re struggling, and it’s time to discuss potential actions. This is a really neat and simple way to generate your list of possible solutions…

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