Friday Mindset #170

Afternoon folks, and Happy Friday.

It’s starting to feel like this term might be defeat-able. There’s just a glimmer of a chance that it might actually end, and we might find ourselves crawling into Christmas, battered and bruised, but alive. Long live that feeling.

Right, listen, last week we did a piece on values, then later came across this wonderful observation about the connection between values and attention:

…this is huge. We don’t mean the relative size of the picture - which is a bit wrong, given the teeniness of the text we’re typing right now 😂The idea. The idea is hefty. People with no clear idea of their values are more likely to have their attention hijacked. Big thought, one to contemplate.

In the meantime, let’s dive in.

Something we're reading...

We’ve really enjoyed this. Writer Naomi Alderman on ‘seven things to tell your kids when they ask what the point of studying is’.

The focus is on AI disrupting the world of work, and young people’s feelings of nouveau nihilism. (Lovely phrase, by the way, taken from the Ipsos poll of young people around the world…)

If the poll is accurate, we’ve got over 60% of young people not planning for the future because it feels too uncertain. AI plays a role in that uncertainty, particularly if as teachers, we’re feeding it with off-the-cuff comments (“Guess that robots will be doing all that in the future!”) Studying might seem like a waste of time if all we hear is there won’t be any jobs.

So Alderman’s article is an antidote, good for a quick tutorial read. Dive in; there are seven cracking pieces of advice here. Stay positive!

Portal Talk...

Turning “you need to work harder” into real coaching

Most of us have had that conversation with a student.

You’re up against a deadline, you’ve only got a couple of minutes, and the data you really need is buried in three different systems. So you fall back on the greatest hits:

• “You need to put more effort in.”

• “You need to plan better.”

• “You just need to revise more.”

We say these things with the best intentions – but they’re vague, a bit disempowering, and they don’t really help students build the metacognitive skills they need to change their behaviour long term.

At VESPA, we think those quick progress chats can become something much more powerful.

When tutors can see, at a glance, how a student is thinking about their work – their vision, effort, systems, practice and attitude – the conversation shifts. Instead of telling them what to do, we can start asking:

• What’s already working for you?

• Where are things breaking down?

• What change do you want to make this week?

That’s where metacognition grows: students reflecting on their habits, making choices, and owning their next steps.

Try our new Coaching Overview demo

We’ve built a short interactive demo to show how this can work inside the VESPA Portal.

The Coaching Overview lets tutors and progress coaches:

• See students’ VESPA questionnaire results and action plans on one screen

• Spot who needs a deeper conversation – and why

• Turn “work harder” into specific, student-owned actions

👉 You can launch the demo here:

It only takes a minute to click around, and we’d love your feedback – especially on how useful this would be in real tutorial conversations.

If you’d like to talk through how it might work in your setting, just reply to this email or book a quick chat from the popup in the demo.

Something to try...

Now and again we’ll have a push on time and attention management with students - and December’s going to be our next one. We’ve chosen our model, an oldie but a goodie - Brian Tracey’s Eat the Frog approach. It’s light-touch and expressed in a suitably silly metaphor, but has something important to say about prioritisation, reactivity and stolen focus.

If you want to join us, we’ve got two things to help you do so. A video of Naomi Lidell introducing the concept, plus a handout with a transcript of Lidell’s intro, plus an activity for students to complete….

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