The Friday Mindset #77

Happy Friday!

Half term is here! It might already be holiday-time for some of you, but we're still grinding away, so the newsletter will be taking its half-term break next week, not this week.

And lucky for you, we've got a few things of interest before you hit the road, including a book giveaway, so less of the faff and dally folks, let's jump right in.

Something to try...

We were planning some CPD sessions with a group of schools recently, and in doing so, were discussing exactly what middle and senior leaders might need from us. Our focus was on heads of 6th Form, but whether that's your role or not, the conversation about thinking-time for leaders that emerged was interesting.

How much time do we allow ourselves for thinking? What priority or value does the organisational culture place on thinking? Who does the thinking in your organisation? How do we encode/formalise thinking in the culture of our school or college?

It all reminded us of an old training session we used to do on thinking, planning and implementation. We swore we'd recorded it on Zoom somewhere... so we promised the member of staff we'd try and dig it up. When we found it, we thought it might be a useful newsletter clip to share. It's just a video of Martin on a Zoom call introducing a very simple concept: the 'progress meeting with self' - one hour a week guarded for thinking time. Someone's got to be doing some thinking in an organisation... it may as well be you. Here's the clip:

p.s. If you're in an 11-18 context it's probably approaching that time of year where next year's timetable starts getting constructed. Have a word with the timetable guru - you never know, you might be able to get your 'progress meeting' formally timetabled...

Something we're reading...

More about thinking! Sometime recently we were chatting with a colleague about Julia Galef's book The Scout Mindset. Galef builds on an oft-used metaphor of thinking types; the 'soldier' defends a point of view, protecting it from attack with additional evidence, or launching counter-attacks regardless of evidence, whereas the 'scout' explores ahead, seeing things for the first time, unburdened by previous positions or beliefs.

It's a book about cognitive bias, about learning to see things how they are, not how we wish they were. (If you know a little about Michael Lewis's book about Kahneman and Tversky, The Undoing Project, this might be familiar ground.)

An interesting counterpoint, or corollary maybe, is Derek Sivers' recent short post, Explorers are Bad Leaders. Staying with the metaphor of scouting, Sivers makes a distinction between the chaos of pathfinding and the clarity of leadership. See what you think; we ended up discussing how, as teachers or middle/senior leaders, we have to be both explorers and leaders - finding the way, clearing the way, then guiding others along it:

Portal Talk....

This week Tony's asking for your help with an idea he's had...

Hello! Currently student retention rates for Post 16 courses nationally stand at about 91%. University 1st year student retention is a little better at 94%. (2019-20 figures). Although these figures have increased slightly from previous years, they mean that about 1 in 10 students starting a post 16 course will leave within the first 6 months. Apart from being disruptive for schools and colleges, this setback has a huge impact on students, some of which don't return to full time education. Which leads me to our idea....

One of our flagship colleges - Neath Port Talbot Colleges Group, South Wales - has been sending us student lists they wanted removed from the VESPA Platform who had left their organisation. Most of these students had already taken the VESPA Questionnaire. With their permission we have been analysing these results and started to build an interesting picture of the factors that may have led to the student decision to leave. Early indications suggesting that low VISION and SYSTEMS score are often key factors in these decisions.

We clearly have a lot more work to do, including a detailed question level analysis from a much larger dataset. To help us, we've reached out to some of our other schools and colleges to request to use their data. In addition we have enlisted Manchester Metropolitan University to help us crunch the numbers with the aim of developing a profile of students most at risk of leaving education. Our ultimate idea is to produce a tool to identify students at the earliest opportunity, and provide a programme of intervention which minimises the risk of them leaving.

To ensure our analysis can be conducted on the largest sample possible from across the UK, we are requesting that any schools or colleges who are currently subscribed to the VESPA Portal, and interested in being a part of this study, get in touch with us as soon as possible. In return we will list you in a feature on our website and share the results with you first. We will also provide any early, trial, resources for free to schools taking part in the study.

Please use the link below to express your interest in joining the study. Thanks!

Our latest offer...

Having thoroughly dismantled Warren Berger's Book of Beautiful Questions for a new activity, it's time to find the book a new home.

We recommended this way back in 2021; it's a list of questions specifically designed to help us make better decisions, solve problems, understand staff, tune-in to organisational culture... all wrapped-up in some decent writing too. All-in-all, a really useful tome for leaders and teachers.

So if you want our copy - it's in decent nick actually - just email [email protected] at around 3:30pm on the day this newsletter comes out, give us a name and school/college address, and it could be yours!

And that's about it for this week. We're taking a well-earned week away from the whiteboard and laptop. Wherever you are, we hope you've had - or have - a wonderful February break. See you on March 3rd!

All the best to you and yours,

Martin, Steve and Tony