The Friday Mindset - Issue #44

Friday at last!

For regular readers it must be hard not to notice that long, long ago we ran out of ideas for witty and/or adolescently-amusing ways to begin this newsletter. Those heady days where we'd begin with descriptions of speedily-emptying schools and name-drop brand-name biscuits are long gone.

This week's no different. We've got nothing. Complete creative bankruptcy.

Aa-nyway we hope the last five days have been good ones for you; we've got some interesting stuff to end the week. Pull up a pew and enjoy!

Something to try...

During a training session at Sheffield University, a friend was asked to respond to the attached document. It's a values list (obtained from a university psychology department) with a couple of activities to do with it.

It struck as as interesting because...

(i) though we'd never seen it before, it reminded us of an activity in The GCSE Mindset called the Motivation Diamond. The attached resource is at a much higher level, like an extension to our activity. Where we had fifteen values or motivations to choose from, this list has over a hundred.

(ii) time and again we find interviewing students, that high vision students have a clearer sense of what their values are. Often the awareness is still developing, but it's there. Any help we can give them is vital and the attached document might really help some of our more directionless KS5 kids.

(iii) high vision students with a clearer sense of their values are in a position to make better choices about courses, jobs, careers, internships and so on. They often set themselves purpose related goals ('do' goals, we call them) as opposed to wealth or status related goals ('have' goals).

(iv) students might explore the attached sheet, then follow up with Problem not Job from The GCSE Mindset as a little vision intervention.

Hope you find this useful!

Core-Values-Worksheet.pdf - Google Drive — drive.google.com

Something we've been reading...

Research this week has been focused on Richard Ryan and Edward Deci's work on extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. If you have a surface awareness of these concepts- like we did until recently - you might have in mind something like, "intrinsic motivation means you're internally motivated, extrinsic means you're motivated by rewards, punishments and other external factors."

Which is true up to a point. What we've found really interesting is that Deci and Ryan suggest five states of motivation, not a binary two. Here they are:

What's interesting here is that - again, without knowing it - our vision activities (hopefully) support the development of different aspects of these motivational states. We're trying to guide students slowly from left to right; gradually away from reward/punishment motivation towards the development of value/belief systems which support and promote hard work for some reason important to the individual not the wider organisation.

Sometimes our activities encourage a move from 'external' to 'somewhat external' - they're short-term goal-setting and impulse control activities. Others encourage a move from 'somewhat external' to 'somewhat internal' - they're introductions to values-systems type activities... and so on.

Here they are:

It's made us think a little more clearly about how to sequence the delivery of vision activities, particularly if we're designing bespoke vision support. Bottom line: we'll have the biggest impact if we can meet the students where they are.

Our latest offer(s)...

Thanks for the feedback and comments about a potential Q&A session. We've attached a date and time. We're mega-busy up until Easter so it'll have to be April. Here are the details:

VESPA Q&A. Ask anything! Wednesday 20th April, 3:45-4:45pm.

You can either:

(i) bring questions with you or

(ii) email them through in advance so we've got the best possible answer ready for you.

The address to say hello is [email protected] - if you'd like to come along, drop us a line and we'll forward you the zoom link. We'd like to keep it relatively small so we can listen to each other's questions and have a useful discussion so first come, first served!

That's it for this week folks. Keep going and we'll see you next Friday. Stay positive,

Steve and Martin

p.s.

Quick reminder: our publishers, Crown House, are offering 25% off cover prices in celebration of their 25 years in the publishing business. All you have to do is enter the code ITL25 at checkout for your discount.