Friday Mindset #93

Happy Friday and welcome to our penultimate newsletter of the academic year!

Next week’s round-up - where we re-post popular stuff that you all gave us nice feedback on - will come next Friday, but this will be our last edition with original content. That is, until we fire it all up again for Friday September 8th.

Wipe away those tears, though - we’ve got some great stuff for you this week - loosely linked by the idea of creative problem solving. Let’s dive in.

Something to try...

We’re sharing a project completed by a VESPA-affiliated organisation today. Tonyrefail School is in South Wales just west of Cardiff. Ably led by two fabulous staff members, this project attempted to tackle a problem. Staff wanted to increase levels of proactive study in students in the Humanities and Social Science faculty. Their solution was ambitious in scope and involved our VESPA questionnaire - we’ll share the findings on that a little later.

The bit we’d like to extract and share with you this time is a section called The Effort Challenge. The staff taught short sessions on effort and introduced three key VESPA activities on effort and practice - then measured the impact on effort levels in year 12 and 13. The findings impacted levels of effort in a really impressive manner, but also changed students’ approaches to revision.

It’s an inspiring and exciting piece of work, and we’re very grateful for the generosity of the staff involved in giving their permission for us to share.

Check it out:

Something we're reading...

We really enjoyed this article from The New Yorker this week. If you fancy it, there’s a fascinating fifteen minutes here, all about problem-solving and creativity… specifically in Maths, in this case, since it’s the work of Dan Rockmore, Professor of Maths and Computational Science at Dartmouth. We’re not mathematicians, but we’re folks who spend a lot of time thinking about problems and coming up with solutions, so this struck a chord.

It’s almost certainly the same with anyone reading this. Unless you’re mechanically and thoughtlessly ploughing through the final weeks, your classes delivered on autopilot, chances are much of your time is spent trying to solve problems. How can we encourage a greater degree of independence? How can we promote ambitious applications to university so the kids don’t settle for less? How can we boost attendance at study sessions? How can we improve preparedness for tests and exams?

Whenever we’re tempted to ignore a problem or just blame circumstances and hope for the best, we remind ourselves of this, from the great Seth Godin:

So check the article out, and turn your mind to a really tricky problem…

Our latest offer...

Our website has 80 powerpoints covering every activity from both The A Level Mindset and The GCSE Mindset so that tutor teams can just deliver. They’re terrific resources but we’re always looking to improve further, so we’re overhauling them this summer. More resources will arrive next year as well. In the meantime, here’s a free one to have a look at.

We’ve shared this one - an Attitude activity from The GCSE Mindset - because, yes, it’s all about problem solving. Of course it’s aimed at students, but hell, we’re all solving problems at this time of year, so we thought it might be a good one to send your way.

Try it - it might give you a fresh perspective on a problem you’re dealing with at the moment…

And that’s it for this week. Whatever problems you’re wrestling with, chances are we’ve done battle with them too - as have hundreds of others - so get in touch if there’s anything VESPA-related you’d like to chat about. We’re still around until Friday 21st. Going dark after that tho… aren’t we all?

Have a good weekend! All the best to you and yours,

Martin, Steve and Tony