Friday Mindset #78

Happy Friday folks - the weekend is here and with it, the promise of spring.

For us, February is the month where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, so it's always a relief to make it through. If you're feeling battered and bruised by circumstances beyond your control, join the club. If you're feeling battered and bruised by circumstances well within your control but you dropped the ball, join the elite inner circle of the club. You get to dine at the top table, swapping disaster stories. We'll be there with you.

OK, onwards.

We've got a special guest this week! Two years ago, head of English and Media Studies Cat Chowdhary got in touch to tell us she was writing a book about pedagogy, and to ask our permission to refer to our work. Of course we said yes - and it was lovely to hear from Cat again, letting us know her book was out this week. So What Does an Outstanding Teacher Do? is available to buy now. As her publishers put it; "Chowdhary provides teachers with recommendations for enhancing practice that easily apply to any classroom, regardless of their subject, speciality or position."

We asked Cat to give us a sneak peak in this week's newsletter...

Something to try... a guest post from Cat Chowdhary

"One way of providing specific time for feedback is by introducing Dedicated Improvement and Reflection Time (DIRT) into your curriculum. This is a set time that you give to the students to be able to read, interpret and apply their feedback, making corrections to their work. Students need to know that it is not just about the end result, but that learning is a process needing reflection and development – no one is perfect first time! A piece of work is not going to be a masterpiece in the first attempt. Encouraging DIRT throughout the learning phase allows students to stop and reflect along the way before it is too late.

When providing students with DIRT, I try to make students take more ownership over their work and their improvements. I wanted to create resilient learners who didn’t just take on my feedback and made necessary improvements, but instead were challenged to think about the process more and work out their mistakes for themselves. This is when I came across feed-forward marking. As Dylan Williams points out ‘feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor.’ In order to do this, four key symbols are provided for my students (., ?, !, *) They work as follows:

They had to look at where I had put the symbols, and then using the sentence starters on the board, they had to give themselves their own feedback."

It's quick, simple and highly effective - a real time-saver. We love it. Thanks Cat! Check out Cat's 'So…What Does an Outstanding Teacher Do: A Visible Learning Evidence Based Approach.' here.

Something we're reading...

We were recently introduced to the work of Canadian academic Henry Mintzberg. Mintzberg is a professor at McGill University in Montreal, and he writes compellingly about leadership and culture change.

This article is a description of how we, as leaders, have to 'see' problems, situations or entire organisations from lots of different perspectives in order to be strategic about what we want to do.

Mintzberg suggests seven ways of seeing things differently, and prompts us to approach our personal leadership challenges by first objectively and patiently assessing them from these seven perspectives. Only then, he argues, do we truly 'see' them... and once we can do that, we can build strategy and lead much more effectively. It's good stuff - certainly got us thinking about whether we've done this effectively in the past, and given us some clarity on projects we're currently helping run:

Portal Talk...

Hello! This week, a reminder of our current project. It's going to be an absolute belter.

We've teamed up with the Psychology department at MMU to look at retention. 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... but we'll find out more as we go.

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. We're aiming to crunch the numbers and, if we can, develop a profile of students most at risk of leaving education.

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...

A final shout-out for an online course coming soon...

On March 23rd, Martin will be running a two-and-a-half hour online session called 'Building Towards Exam Success', which will cover a 15-item curriculum for preparing year 11s, 12s and 13s for effective revision. It'll cover motivation, organisation, and of course revision itself. Of the 15 activities, ten will be brand new, and there'll be handouts, a powerpoint and a suggested curriculum too.

It's a steal at £150 of your CPD budget holder's money! Here's the deets...

So that's it for now, folks. Another week down. Get your ass out amongst the daffodils! All the best to you and yours,

Martin, Steve and Tony

p.s. Fancy writing a VESPA-related guest post yourself? Get in touch at [email protected] and we can chat.