Friday Mindset #91

Happy Friday!

Pop quiz: what does this newsletter have in common with Pablo Picasso, JD Salinger and Harriet Tubman?

That’s right, it’s made it to the grand old age of 91.

We’re aiming for 100, when we’ll… er… give something away to… some people. It’s a plan in its early stages as you can perhaps tell.

Anyway, another week bites the dust, let’s dive in!

Something to try...

We’ve been doing a lot of work on coaching recently. Organisations we’re working with are interested in how they can use short, structured conversations to:

(i) encourage self-directed changes in student behaviour and

(ii) improve the culture of their organisation.

When done well, coaching can achieve both these objectives. One thing you might want to try is identifying the simplest, most transferable behaviours typical of your most successful students to explore during coaching conversations. Working with one organisation, we reviewed long lists of possibilities and chose 15 key behaviours we wanted coaching conversations to engender. Here they are:

They’re in VESPA order; Vision (1) Effort (2-5) Systems (6-9) Practice (10-11) and Attitude (12-15) and were chosen like this because the organisation in question wanted that weighting.

They might be a useful starting point for a discussion with staff or students. A never-sometimes-always analysis for example, or a discussion of which you’d get rid of and what you might replace them with. It all helps align expectations for next year.

(btw, get in touch if you’d like some similar CPD around culture, expectation and student independence; the session’s been getting some great feedback)

Something we're reading...

This is Hypervisualised’s infographic summary about being a more effective and productive leader at work:

It’s pretty good - clear, with some useful insights. What really struck us, though, was what a good style-model it was for students.

Imagine we did this with our year 12s…

We give them this, ask them to discuss it, analyse how it works, and then produce one for next year’s Year 11/12s, with 7-10 key pieces of advice for successfully starting GCSE/A levels.

Now imagine handing it out in September - it’ll be a really useful resource that might help structure tutorial discussions in the early stages of the new academic year!

Our latest offer...

A reminder this week: we have a brand new student session ready to go. It's designed to be run online, and is delivered by friend of VESPA Dr Jo Phillips (Sheffield University.) It's called 'Preparing for University'. Here's Jo to introduce the session:

"Hello, I'm Jo and after teaching and being a Head of English in Sixth Form and FE Colleges I found my way into lecturing in HE. I have twelve years experience in two different Universities and now teach undergrad and postgrad students, who face all the challenges and demands of university study, responding to these in a wide variety of ways. I support my students through tutorials which give plenty of insights into their experience, which I can pass on to your year 11s and 12s, helping to reassure them about what to expect but also seeking to prepare them for being truly independent and self-motivated learners."

The session has been jointly developed, is an hour long and will be run on Zoom, Teams or as a Google Meet. We think it would suit students at any point in the university application process. It won't go big on VESPA activities - we don't want to duplicate our other sessions - but will emphasise non-cognitive elements of study; habits, strategies and routines... all very compatible with our usual work.

If you're interested, get in touch at the usual address, or fill out a training request form on our website!

That’s it for this week, friends. We’re off to Google ‘famous people who made it to the age of 92’ for next week’s intro.

All the best to you and yours,

Steve, Tony and Martin

p.s. Here’s a great blog from Farnam Street about the role writing plays in learning - a kind of anti-AI polemic that might be really good to share with students…