The Friday Mindset - Issue #56

June 24, 2022

A hot Friday at the end of a week of blazing sunshine. Ice-cream time, surely?

Back in this distant past it was Strawberry, Chocolate or, if you were lucky, Raspberry Ripple. Not these days. By the power of capitalism alone, we now have S'Mores, Dublin Mudslide, Buttered Pecan and erm, Dirt Cake, which sounds like what you get when there's a protest in the Year 9 toilets.

Aa-nyway, moving on. This week is the latest stop on our journey to use the summer term to level-up kids - the pre-GCSE-ers who need an interesting challenge, the 10s revving up for 11, the 12s getting ready for the year of UCAS and apprenticeship applications... yup, these last few weeks have been about focusing on the activities we can run, the ideas we need to spread and the cultural capital we can embed while the pressure is off!

We've covered goal-setting, sweet-and-sour summers, we've shared our A-Z of university courses activity... next is assertive action. Dive in and enjoy.

Something to try...

In this week's short powerpoint we tell the true story of one of our students (we've changed her name) to illustrate the power of assertive action.

Short version: Lisa had her heart set on Psychology at Chester Uni but on results day they rejected her. So she drove all the way to Chester and waited in reception until the admissions team would see her. Then she hung around until the news came through that another student had declined their offer - and she made a case for her taking their place. They said yes.

If only all of our students could show such initiative and determination!

In this session, we challenge students to show just a tiny fraction of Lisa's get-up-and-go... by entering a competition. Any competition - as long as they do it this summer. We've suggested just over 30 competitions they could start with - everything is hyperlinked, and at the time of writing, none of the deadlines have passed.

We've run this session many times before; it always works best when delivered enthusiastically with an accompanying anecdote. Tell the story of the time you won a competition, or a previous student did. Get them fired up! Enjoy!

A story about hustle - and a challenge to enter one of the 30+ competitions included here in the session!

Something we're reading...

David Robson's The Expectation Effect has been interesting. Robson explores the role psychology plays in handling stress, losing weight, getting fitter, staying healthy, performing in exams and other things too.

He argues a (significant?) percentage of our outcomes are down to expectation - we subconsciously create the outcomes we expect - an idea you'll be familiar with if you've looked at classic studies of the pygmalion effect in education.

It's an easy read - journalistically written and structured with lots of references to studies - some of them absolutely astounding. Good stuff.

The Expectation Effect is a journey through the cutting-edge science of how our mindset shapes every facet of our lives, revealing how your brain holds the keys to unlocking a better you. It is published by Canongate in the UK (Jan 2022) and Henry Holt in the USA (Feb 2022).

Our latest offer...

OK folks - last call for our Network for Learning session on June 28th. We’ve called it ‘Building Towards Exam Success: A fifteen-lesson curriculum’. Martin will be exploring a 15-session plan for taking year11s or 12s from day one of the next academic year all the way through to their exams. It's all online. Details are here:

Building Towards Exam Success - A fifteen-lesson curriculum for encouraging motivation, organisation and effective revision... , Powered By Finetune CMS

And that's it for this week. Go get yourself an ice-cream before the rain sets in. Steer clear of the Dirt Cake though, eh?

Sunny solstice vibes to you and yours,

Steve and Martin