The Friday Mindset - Issue #48

April 22, 2022

Hello everyone and happy Friday! Hope you've had a good break and are returning well-rested for the best term of the year; the business-end, the term of sunny days, stuffy exam halls and occasional motivational ice-creams.

Our focus for the next few weeks will be on positively managing pressure. Over the last couple of newsletters we've looked at (i) beating procrastination and (ii) getting out of your own head, and today we've got some stuff on positive habit formation that could prove useful at this time of year.

Hope you find something to help your students in this lot - let's dive in!

Something to try...

When we discuss habit formation with students, we always emphasise the positive, It's much easier to start a new habit - there's optimism, a feeling of possibility, a sense of a fresh beginning - than to berate yourself as you try and break an old one.

So keep it relentlessly positive in the coming weeks.

You might want to try The Three Rs of Habit, and activity from The A Level Mindset. If you want a simple introduction to how it works, this article is a good place to start. If you want it as a word doc, for photocopying and distributing we've got you covered - it's at the bottom of the page, go for it.

And if you want a quick powerpoint about habit formation, we've prepared one for you this week. We've taken the work of James Clear - specifically this article on his website - and turned it into a presentation with a neat video clip and activity for you as well. Enjoy!

A short powerpoint on environment design and habit formation

Something we've been reading...

This article has been an interesting one. It's a discussion of a paper published recently here. We can't access the full paper for some reason, but the article seems to do a decent job of summarising it.

In it, there's some thought-provoking stuff about the size of rewards needed to change behaviour - much much smaller than we'd think. This might well help students design better reward systems for themselves.

Check it out:

A study of truly piddling rewards in online learning.

Our latest offer...

We’ve got a book giveaway this week!

Two to go at, folks:

If you’d like a well-read copy of Jessica Lahey's The Gift of Failure (subtitle How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go), just hit us up at the usual email address as quick as you can - leave us a school address and we’ll post it to you next week. Go!

Or alternatively, if Adam Grant's Originals (How Non-Conformists Change the World) sounds right up your street, do the same - email us at [email protected], leave an address and stake your claim. Go!

(Disclaimer: we do not get free books from publishers. Some people seem to have that gift... we don't. We buy books with our own pocket-money and read them before giving them away so if they're a little dog-eared, you know why!)

And that's it for this week. All the best for a lovely sunny weekend. We're off to hit the skate park in our boxfresh hi-tops, wearing our caps backwards, drinking cider and comparing tattoos.

Have a good one.

Steve and Martin

p.s. we're so close to 1000 subscribers it's actually quite painful so if you know anyone who'd enjoy this newsletter, put us out of our misery and send them this link:

The Friday Mindset - News from the VESPA Mindset team. Including: something to try with your students, something we've been reading/watching and our latest of

Word doc version of online article