Friday Mindset #167

Happy Friday!

Another half-term’s worth of newsletters done.

Many thanks to the thousands of you who open and read every Friday. It means a lot!

And a huge woop-woop to our group of full subscribers. A small but brave band of warriors. You’re legends, folks, we couldn’t do it without you. (Quite literally, you’re keeping the whole project going 👏👏👏👏)

OK, one more issue to go before our two-week break from writing. Let’s dive in.

Something we're reading...

Homework.

Yeah, it’s a topic on our minds. Recently we’ve been working with some schools - in admittedly difficult contexts and circumstances - who tell us they’ve virtually given up setting homework. The battle is lost, no-one does it anyway, what’s the point. We began wondering how much of a learning deficit might be building up in these contexts.

So this is a very interesting piece about homework, featuring a series of papers and six major conclusions. It largely concentrates on US schools and therefore uses the US grade-system, (so add a year) and looks at the impact homework has on primary and secondary school pupils, drawing some really interesting conclusions.

A few that caught our attention:

• Homework has a greater and greater impact as the pupil gets older - as long as it’s purposeful.

• Reading and writing practice beats endless drills, particularly for younger kids.

• High quality homework has a positive impact on behavioural engagement, but poor homework does the opposite…

The picture’s hyperlinked and will take you to the piece. It’s really good stuff!

Portal Talk 101... over to Tony!

Last week I did a big re-introduction of the questionnaire and the reports it can generate. What I didn’t cover, was the access to the resources you also get when your students do the questionnaire.

Sign your students up to the questionnaire, and you get 120 powerpoints. That’s one powerpoint for every activity Steve and Martin have ever published (40 in The A Level Mindset, another 40 in The GCSE Mindset and a further 40 in The VESPA Handbook.)

Let’s have a closer look…

^{VESPA Activities}

In total Martin and Steve have created over 120 activities - that’s 24 for each of the 5 VESPA themes. Imagine having 24 vision activities, or 24 ideas to turn to if you want to raise levels of effort, or project management, or effective revision… Well, you don’t have to imagine; we’ve translated every activity into an online resource that can be completed independently by the student, without the requirement for workbooks or printing:

Our new VESPA Activities section has been transformed into an interactive, student led page, designed to encourage students to complete these with growing independence.

Students are still recommended up to 10 activities based on their VESPA Scores, however they can also choose to select their own, based on different “Study Problems” they might be encountering, for example, "I get distracted really easily when I try to study" or "I'm not very organised with my notes and deadlines".

We’re really proud of what we’ve created, so would love to show you more! After half term, I will be going through the new Tutor Pages and how these are being used across the UK and Internationally to enhance student conversations.

As ever, book in a meeting with me if you’d like to know more…

Something to try...

We’ve talked a lot about episodic future thinking on this newsletter. When schools or colleges complain their students aren’t aspirational enough, we regularly find that there are insufficient examples or models for the learners to lock onto.

• High schools who want their students to aspire to A Level study at a local sixth form… but the only contact the students have with the college is a once-a-year post-16 study event. (Miss it, and you’re knackered.)

• Or post-16 organisations that want a greater degree of aspiration from their students - who seem listlessly lacking agency - but the only example the students have seen of university life is a one-off lecture by a visiting speaker towards the end of year 12 and a dog-eared display board.

If students are to build compelling, exciting cognitive maps of the future, they need an example-rich environment. And this week’s powerpoint is going to help you get started…

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