Friday Mindset #98

It’s Friday!

It’s been such a busy month for staff and student training we’re pretty much on our knees. As you will be too, no doubt.

Staff training is full until January (the 5th and 8th are booked but the rest of the month is looking pretty free.) There are still a few spaces left for student sessions this term, including a special session mentioned below, but we’ll get to that.

OK, blurb over, let’s dive in.

Something to try...

Here’s something we’ve been exploring with A level students recently. It’s from a university student survey that captures information about life as an undergraduate. In this image, students from different disciplines make estimations about how much work they do. The bars are split into three sections: lectures, seminars and other reactive work sessions come first (in red). Independent study comes second (the pale blue), and part-time work or work-based learning - work-shadowing or placements - comes third (in yellow).

Check it out:

What does this tell us? We think there’s lots of interesting discussion to be had about the proportion of each:

• How many hours is a typical undergraduate working week?

• How much work are undergraduates setting themselves?

• How does it compare to the amount of taught hours they get?

• How does it compare to students’ current study habits?

Next, we’ve been exploring exactly what kind of work undergrads do in their own time. We’ve trawled YouTube to find the best ‘day in the life’/‘week in the life’ of an undergraduate we can find. Many of them are too long, self-indulgent and tedious, one of the reasons we never ended up using them.

But we’ve got one here - from Stephanie - that we’ve cut from 9 minutes to 2. Stephanie’s at university in Australia. (If you recognise the city from the shots you see, please get in touch so we can let students know!)

Here’s the video for you:

Something we're reading...

We’ve been excited by the idea explored in this article, by leadership coach and former CEO Mandy Brown. It’s about time management (stay with us…) and explores the idea that not all time is equal. We’ve read a lot of material about time and attention management - more than most, we suspect - and this has been the best fresh idea since the stuff we read in Laura Vanderkam’s Tranquility by Tuesday.

Namely, it’s the idea that energy creates time - or at least, creates the feeling of having more time. That starting one’s day with a positive task leaves us feeling fuelled up and ready for what comes next - energised - and so time extends and expands.

It’s full of swears, folks, so don’t take this one into the classroom. The five minutes it takes you to read though - they’ll be well worth it.

Our latest offer...

Dr Jo Phillips of Sheffield University helps us out by running our online Preparing for University student session. Off the back of recent sessions she’s received feedback like, “…it was excellent,” “the room was fully engaged", "my top achievers were glued to the talk," and “it was great.”

This is a session perfectly tailored to Year 13 students because it’s designed to encourage university-style study habits beginning now. It covers three broad areas -

• ‘a week at university’ - which covers what a uni timetable looks like as well as time management

• ‘what will be new at university’ - which covers independent work

• ‘excelling at university’ - which covers positive attitudes to challenge and the benefits of wide support networks

If you’re interested, now’s a good time of year for the talk! Request a booking using the form on the website.

And that’s it for this week. Two more to go and we’ve hit the big 100! All the best to you and yours,

Martin, Steve and Tony

p.s. very excited about this. 40 brand-new activities, all written post-covid. You can pre-order using the link. In case you don’t know about the power of pre-ordering; it gives publishers a heads-up about printing runs and sales, allowing them to better market the book, so if you fancy a copy, follow the link and blessings upon you ;-)