The Friday Mindset - Issue #31

November 12, 2021

It's Friday!

All across the campus, staff are packing their bags and trudging wearily towards their family saloons. But not us. Oh no, we're sticking around for a brainstorming session that includes a vision activity and powerpoint, a difficult question about students' enjoyment of school, two more FREE books to give away and a reminder about our December training course,

That's right, we may be exhausted but we're packing it in big-time this week in an attempt to impress.

Off we go.

Something to try...

Last week, Seth Godin - whose blog we read every day as soon as the daily post is published - put up a piece called 'Who Will Criticise Your Dreams?'

It's fantastic. In it, he asserts there are two levels of dreaming/goal-setting/vision-building.

The strategic. This is a feeling of what you want to achieve, without specifics. It might be, "a creative industry where I get to solve interesting problems and work in teams", or "something to do with science where I get to advance our knowledge", or "something involving nature, the outdoors and conservation."

The tactical. This is a super-specific list of requirements, often with precise job roles, titles and responsibilities attached. "A paediatrician, working with sick children", "a solicitor in a law firm based in London, working on cases that involve disputes", or "a PE teacher working at a comprehensive school and running after-school teams and clubs."

Godin argues we often get the two mixed up. We feel we have to start with the tactical, and as a result, wind-up stuck because an obstacle prevents us making progress. We start too specific, and often, we only have tactics - no strategy to back it up.

It made us think about a number of our vision activities, and how their outcomes are often clarity about strategy, not clarity about tactics. The Perfect Day, The Motivation Diamond and Problem not Job, for example, are vision sessions that encourage some high level strategic thinking, not specific tactical planning.

Why not have a go at this with students? Explain the difference between strategy and tactics, split a page into two columns, and discuss goal-setting under these two headings.

It's something we're going to have a go at over the next few weeks, picking off students who've scored 1, 2 or 3 out of 10 for vision on their psychometric test.

We've put together a short presentation to accompany the session. It's just a quick intro and then The Perfect Day activity in powerpoint form... but it's a start! Feel free to give it a go - the link's at the bottom!

Something we've been reading...

This impressive, longitudinal study struck us as interesting when we saw it in Nature this week. It's the work of Morris, Dorling, Davies and Davey Smith, a team working across the University of Bristol and Oxford and, though it's been running for ten years, its findings are weirdly timely.

Let's fillet it for you. "School enjoyment [at age 6] is strongly associated with later achievement in age 16 compulsory GCSE exams even after adjustment for socioeconomic background and cognitive ability," it claims. The study goes on to find that, "...pupils who reported enjoying school scored... [the] equivalent to almost a 3-grade increase across all subjects..." compared to peers who didn't.

The researchers point out that school enjoyment is a more malleable factor than socioeconomic circumstances, previous performance, and so on - and that there is no connection with reported school enjoyment and these factors. Students aren't doomed to dislike school because of their wider circumstances.

"It is remarkable," they conclude, "that school enjoyment as early as age 6 explains differences in GCSE outcomes a decade later so well. The differences in achievement by enjoyment were almost as large as differences by parental occupational social class and sex, which have been widely acknowledged to be intervention-worthy inequalities."

It's readable and fascinating stuff; check out the link at the bottom. It's really got us thinking. What would we do if we were put in charge of increasing student enjoyment of school or college? Where would we start?

Our latest offers...

It's been clear-out time for us recently, so here's a couple of giveaways that might interest you!

One copy of The Student Mindset was discovered lurking. It's yours if you want it - just email us as soon as you read this, and if you're first to get in touch, we'll send it out for free to the school or college address you specify.

And one more copy of Storycraft: How to Teach Narrative Writing has surfaced! (Three went in the post last week - lucky winners should have them by now...) Storycraft is Martin's handbook for improving creative writing in GCSE English classes and beyond, and has garnered some stellar feedback (see below)

So if you'd like our last free copy, email us super-fast and we'll stick it in the post for you.

What else? Oh yes - it's great to see tickets selling fast for our London training day.

It's on December 14th, and will be our first face-to-face training day like this since those heady pre-COVID days. We're giving newsletter readers the chance to co-design the content of the day. If you have questions, issues, topics you want covered... just say so and we'll make sure it's as bespoke an experience as we can make it.

Really looking forward to it - put the date in your diary and hassle your CPD budget-holder if you want to come along! Link below.

And that's it for this week. Pick something nice up on the way home, eh?

All the best,

Steve and Martin

Powerpoint to accompany Seth Godin's blogpost

Education is influenced by a broad range of factors but there has been limited research into the role that early school enjoyment plays in pupil’s educational achievement. Here we used data from a UK cohort to answer three research questions. What is the association between early school enjoyment and later academic achievement? To what extent do family background factors underlie this association? Do sex differences in school enjoyment underlie sex differences in achievement?

Eventbrite - Steve Oakes & Martin Griffin presents VESPA - Full Day (London Course) - Tuesday, December 14, 2021 at Union Jack Club, London, England. Find event and ticket information.