Friday Mindset #99

It’s Friday!

Which means confiscated Haribo followed later by chilled beers, fancy wines and pizza night.

Before we get there though, a few things for you to consider. There’s a thematic through-line this week - it’s almost like we plan these things! We’ve got a powerpoint exploring the attention economy - we hope it might provoke discussion and reflection - we’ve got a really interesting model for behaviour change - which we hope might provoke discussion and reflection - and a free activity that we hope might provoke… well, you get the idea.

Let’s dive in.

Something to try...

We were discussing social media use with a group of underperforming students recently. They’d taken the VESPA Questionnaire, and were completing a short prose description of their results - whether they agreed with them, how accurate they felt they were, what they needed to do to improve.

Focus, concentration, attention and phone use came up again and again.

An idea for a session about the attention economy surfaced on the train home. What if we framed social media use as a job for which you get paid nothing? Users are, after all, working to support and develop a resource owned by someone else - constantly labouring to improve the product - and they’re doing it for free.

So we made a powerpoint. We’ve not delivered it yet - we don’t get to see the group again for some time - but we thought you might want to take a look, give us some feedback or feel free to trial it yourself:

Something we’re reading...

Tony’s been exploring The Behaviour Wizard over the summer. It’s the work of celebrated psychologist, and founder of The Behaviour Design Lab at Stanford University, Dr BJ Fogg.

We’ve been interested in Fogg’s work for ages - one of the activities in The A Level Mindset was inspired by his work - but The Behaviour Wizard is a new one for us.

The model suggests different types of behaviour change. A ‘dot’ is a single behaviour, just executed once. A ‘span’ is a behaviour repeated three or four times across a short span of time, and a ‘path’ is a from-now-on behaviour.

There are also different types of behaviour, colour-coded. For each behaviour change there are examples, plus suggestions for how to make the behaviour stick. We think this has some really interesting applications for study behaviours, and scope for use in coaching conversations.

See what you think…

Portal Talk

The Behaviour Wizard reading got us thinking about how important good habits are for students. Early work at the Stanford Lab led to the development of the algorithms which drive our most addictive mobile phone apps, for example the development of the trigger sounds, buzzes and concept of streaks came from this earlier work. We know how problematic these can be with students in school and to help you try you try and develop some more positive student habits we’re giving away one of our revamped activities - in its beta phase - which will be live for the next 2 weeks.

The activity slides are below and can be opened from the link - remember, two weeks only! We’d also love any feedback on the design and flow of the deck.

If your school is not yet subscribed to our online portal and would like to find out more, about our resource slides and student programmes. Please use the link below to arrange a short meeting to discuss the different options!

Our latest offer...

A book giveaway today! We’ve got a copy of Ross Morrison McGill’s book The Teacher Toolkit Guide to Memory to give away. We’ve read it, taken notes and - ahem - committed the contents to memory so we can safely send it along the line to its new owner.

All you have to do is email us today - [email protected] - as soon as you read this, and give us a ‘yes please’, plus a work address we can post it to.

And that’s it for this week! Don’t forget the pizza on the way home.

All the best to you and yours,

Martin, Steve and Tony