The Friday Mindset - Issue #42

February 18, 2022

This is the last newsletter before we take a break for half term... apologies to those staff who are already on a break and are trying to avoid reading this and maintain a blissful holiday state!

We'll be back on the first Friday in March. In the meantime though, some exciting stuff to share this week - including a potentially interesting vision session, a deep dive into interleaving which will pretty-much bring you up-to-speed on the whole area of study, and an upcoming Q&A in case anyone's got any issues they want to discuss.

Off we go!

Something to try...

We've been thinking a lot about this piece by Scott Young:

You're only as smart as your thinking tools. Here are twenty-five tools, drawn from different professions, you can apply to your most difficult challenges!

It started out because we were interested in thinking tools and this seemed a decent introduction. If you haven't clicked the link yet, Young goes through 25 professions and picks out one way of thinking - a thinking tool - which typifies that profession. The entry for teachers begins like this: "How do you create knowledge inside someone else’s mind? How can you give them abilities they didn’t have before? Most of us take for granted how amazing teaching actually is, and our own ability to learn from it. To be effective, teachers need to have a model of how their pupils' minds see the world, as well as a game plan for changing it."

The article struck us as a potentially interesting tool to begin a vision-discussion with students. But then the resource became even more interesting after we listened to Cal Newport on Tim Ferriss's podcast. Newport talks about how some people strengthen their sense of self, their resolve, direction and their values by deliberately joining "communities of character". Of course the obvious example he used was the military, but it struck us there's a great crossover here. Communities of character - teachers, doctors, artists - have their own thinking tools.

There's a vision activity in this, so here's what we're going to try as a very simple start...

  • Explain 'communities of character' in professions and ask for/discuss some examples

  • Give out copies of the thinking tools, and explain this is a simplified collection of 'communities of character' typified by the thinking tools they use

  • Ask students to choose and justify a top three that interest them most - they can then reflect on what this says about their values and ambitions.

Something we've been reading...

Steve's been diving deep into interleaving as a study strategy, and has been looking at the work of Faria Sana (Assistant Professor and Cognitive Scientist.) The website associated with her research is good in and of itself - check it out. But this paper in particular is one we've been looking at:

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If you can't access for any reason, Sana's also clearly been doing the rounds at conferences because the slides from her presentations are available online. Here's what a similar study to the paper looks like as a series of slides. It's possible to follow what's going on pretty well:

Faria Sana on interleaving - slides

As Sana points out, most classroom interleaving studies (Taylor and Rohrer for example - we've linked to it before) are done in Maths. She, however, works in Economics (see slides) and science (see the paper itself), so this is a good indication that interleaving works in slightly differing contexts.

The results? Well, they're strikingly similar to Taylor and Rohrer's findings. Interleaving slightly reduces performance during the revision session because it's harder... but it significantly boosts performance during tests because it's basically spaced practice - a high utility revision technique.

In short: don't cram in big blocks of the same topic. Move from topic to topic. It'll feel harder, but you'll perform better on the day.

A Q&A with Sana here is also useful:

Dr. Faria Sana was awarded funds from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Insight Development Grant program for her project entitled, Investigating the Interleaving Effect in Classrooms to Boost Student Retention. We sat down with her to learn more about her exciting research.

Our latest offer...

We thought we'd try a Zoom-based Q&A to help anyone who's running VESPA at the moment and would like any help. You might be wondering - how do I design a curriculum? Which sessions have you found work best in a Covid context? Have you seen organisations implement across different key stages? How might you measure impact? Why have I got a moany tutor who doesn't want to take part? There's lots of possibilities to go at, with no particular theme.

First we want to figure out how the session would look. We could either:

(i) run it live and people come along for a chat, or

(ii) record it, and people send in questions that we answer during the recording, which we then make available, or

(iii) a hybrid of the two.

Please let us know if you have any interest, or any preference for how it's done. Get in touch at [email protected], or just hit the 'thumbs up' icon at the bottom of the letter so we can get a feel for the level of interest. We'll be setting a date after half term.

And that's it for now. The holiday is finally here and Spring is on the way!

All the best,

Steve and Martin