The Friday Mindset - Issue #52

May 20, 2022

Happy Friday!

We've had an exam-preparedness focus for the last six weeks, covering all sorts of issues around study both practical and psycho-emotional.

This is the last one of these; it's a final-push prioritisation task for you to try. We've been setting students fun challenges (fun? Well fun's relative at this time of year isn't it....) for the half-term holidays ahead to help focus their purposeful revision - and this newsletter covers the last one of them.

Next week we'll turn our attention to something else, something fresh and future-focused, away from tests and exams - and we're excited to share some new ideas with you in the weeks to come.

Anyway, that's coming up. For now, let's dive in:

Something to try...

In The A Level Mindset, there's an activity called The Lead Domino. It uses the metaphor of dominoes to explore task-priority.

Some tasks are lead dominoes: once they're done, they make lots of subsequent tasks easier - almost knocking them down for you so you don't have to put anywhere near as much work in.

The trouble is that lead dominoes can be hard to complete. After all, they're the first push that creates all subsequent movement. They often involve tackling something that students have been putting off; blockages they need to clear. Over the last few weeks, we've seen three types in the kids we're working with:

  • an intellectual blockage: a topic or concept that's hard, that the student doesn't fully understand, and so makes all subsequent work involving that concept really tough too.

  • a time blockage: a piece of work that is taking up lots of time; once complete, it will open up lots of free-time to allow other small tasks to be finished as well.

  • a resource blockage: a task that's taking up all the storage on a computer (and making the whole laptop run slowly; we've seen this in photography, digital arts subjects, undergrad architects), or similarly a task that's monopolising all the psychological bandwidth a student has; all their attention-resource is focussed on it.

These blockages tend to be lead dominoes - stuff the student needs to get done first in order to release the capacity to tackle other things. But we don't like doing our lead domino tasks. They're blockages for a reason!

Try this:

  1. Use this video - it'll make them gasp if nothing else, keep going until the end - to introduce the idea of lead dominoes and the huge impact they can have once this single domino has been knocked down.

  2. Now try this video (we've clipped this together for you so it's pretty short) to explore geometric growth. Every domino can knock over a domino one-and-a-half times its size. (A good metaphor for lead dominoes!)

  3. Now get students to reflect on what their lead dominoes might be, subject-by-subject. They can then prioritise them for next week.

One last thing - it's often good if you join in with them on this one. You'll have a lead domino you need to knock over too; if you share yours, modelling a little reflection and vulnerability, they'll engage more fully with the task and make braver decisions.

Something we've been reading...

You might not have come across the DFE's research report 16-19 Learners’ Experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many thanks for Becky Cox of Herts for Learning for putting us onto this. It's compiled from a small sample (15) of interviews that took place with young learners in Middlesbrough, Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester. Their voices come through strongly here; if you need any further insight into the psyche of the post-covid student, it's here.

We'll be using sections of it to engage parents in particular - it will be useful to share voices of kids other than their own in outlining the problems we're dealing with at the moment. It might work to summarise issues with post-16 staff as well. It's a very quick and readable document:

Hot of the press!

Our latest offer....

A giveaway this week! We're writing a new book - 40 more VESPA activities coming your way sometime soon(ish). This one here is a vision activity that probably isn't going to make it in. We've used it for ages; nearly put it in The GCSE Mindset, then nearly put it in The Student Mindset. Now it looks like it's going to miss out again, purely because we're writing/experimenting with shiny new stuff and this one feels a little old.

It's good though, we always enjoy the two 30 minute sessions it takes to run. Martin did this with 40 students around desks in a college library last summer - it went down really well, and triggered some interesting conversations. Staff liked it too! Give it a go. It's called Ikigai:

A two-part vision activity good for KS4 and 5 students

And finally, we've got the Eventbrite link to our training day on July 7th. Here it is!

Eventbrite - Steve Oakes & Martin Griffin presents VESPA - London in-person training day - Thursday, 7 July 2022 - Find event and ticket information.

And that's it for now, folks. Positive weekend vibes to you and yours,

Steve and Martin