The Friday Mindset - Issue #58

July 08, 2022

Happy Summer!

We've got a greatest-hits-of-the-year thing going on this week. Which activities did you (and us...) enjoy the most? Which reading recommendations hit home and which missed by miles? You've given us a few thumbs-up across the year and we can see who's clicking what, so we think we've got a pretty accurate sense of what you've found useful and what you've found crappy nonsense.

So this week, to celebrate the summer hols, we've got three activities that have gone well for us this year, and have been downloaded and used by you in large numbers too.

And we've got three reading recommendations that seem to have proved popular as well.

If you missed 'em the first time around, here they are again!

Our top 3 'something to try'-s from this year...

From last October, Informational Interviews:

A great Vision activity with A level students is to encourage the idea of the informational interview. This is a concept borrowed from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ book Designing Your Life, one of the best books on vision we’ve read (we recommended it back in newsletter 4).

In it, Burnett and Evans argue that because of the hyper-connectivity of the world we live in, traditional ways of finding work - responding to job adverts - are falling out of fashion. Vast numbers of jobs (or internships) are never advertised, they say. Instead, future employees, interns or volunteers are found on LinkedIn, or because of an interaction on social media, or because ‘a friend knows someone.’

It’s something we’ve seen in the freelance parts of our working lives; work arrives because someone told someone who told someone… who got in touch with us to find out more.

Burnett and Evans make a good case for meeting with people doing the kind of work you’d like to do, and interviewing them. Just spending an hour asking them about their working lives; being genuinely curious about what their work is like. You get remembered, they say. And then, the next time an opportunity comes up, the chance might fall to you. It’s not a way forward for every student, but it might open a world of possibilities for some. Here’s a short powerpoint to use if you’d like to introduce the idea.

How to find work you enjoy

From last March - Tackling Procrastination:

We’ve been checking out the work of Vanessa Hill after her Youtube channel, Braincraft, was recommended. We were impressed with her analysis of procrastination; why it happens and what we can do about it.

In this short PowerPoint we’ve taken a two-minute clip of Hill giving 4 pieces of advice for tackling procrastination.

There are just a few further activities - we’re particularly happy with the video we’ve clipped together of the skateboarder using mental preparation - but the rest is a chance for students to reflect and plan as a result. They could watch and then discuss which of the four pieces of advice strikes them as most useful, they could make a commitment to start working on a task they’ve been putting off… there are plenty of options to consider.

Hope you find it useful!

How to beat procrastination

And from May this year, James Clear on Habit Formation:

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.

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. 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!

How to build better habits through environment design

Our top 3 'something we've been reading'-s from this year...

From last September, Dan Coyle's The Culture Code:

Higher levels of academic effort often come as the result of culture; that unseen network of shared beliefs, values and expectations that seems to be emitted in every corridor, conversation and lesson.

A great book on culture creation is Dan Coyle’s The Culture Code; a must-read for leaders, and those of us who want to be the architects of a better culture. We couldn’t recommend this readable study more highly:

Buy The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups 01 by Coyle, Daniel (ISBN: 9781847941268) from Amazon's Book Store.

From last November, the Morris/Dorling/Davies/Davey Smith study:

This impressive, longitudinal study struck us as interesting when we saw it in Nature this week. It’s the work of Morris, Dorling, Davies and Davey Smith, a team working across the University of Bristol and Oxford and, though it’s been running for ten years, its findings are weirdly timely.

Let’s fillet it for you. “School enjoyment [at age 6] is strongly associated with later achievement in age 16 compulsory GCSE exams even after adjustment for socioeconomic background and cognitive ability,” it claims. The study goes on to find that, “…pupils who reported enjoying school scored… [the] equivalent to almost a 3-grade increase across all subjects…” compared to peers who didn’t.

The researchers point out that school enjoyment is a more malleable factor than socioeconomic circumstances, previous performance, and so on - and that there is no connection with reported school enjoyment and these factors. Students aren’t doomed to dislike school because of their wider circumstances.

“It is remarkable,” they conclude, “that school enjoyment as early as age 6 explains differences in GCSE outcomes a decade later so well. The differences in achievement by enjoyment were almost as large as differences by parental occupational social class and sex, which have been widely acknowledged to be intervention-worthy inequalities.”

It’s readable and fascinating stuff; check out the link at the bottom. It’s really got us thinking. What would we do if we were put in charge of increasing student enjoyment of school or college? Where would we start?

Download a pdf of the paper here

And from June, Richard Wiseman's 59 Seconds:

Richard Wiseman’s 59 Seconds is a cracker - a quick, funny and engaging look at the evidence behind lots of the messages pushed by the self-improvement and self-help industry.

Are we given dodgy advice, or is there evidence there to prove its usefulness? In 59 Seconds, Wiseman systematically lists everything that has been proven to work, and jettisons all the stuff that doesn’t. We love it - and it goes down well with students too.

Buy 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot Main Market by Wiseman, Richard (ISBN: 9781447273370) from Amazon's Book Store.

Our latest offer...

A reminder! It's at this time of year that schools often get interested in our online offer. Over at vespa.academy you can see everything we do to help schools and colleges use the questionnaire, the online resources, the PowerPoint packages, the coaching reports, and so on.

But as we mentioned last week, there's a lot to explore and at first it can be tough to get your head around.

If you'd like a free, no obligations tour of the site, the questionnaire and the materials with one of us, get in touch at [email protected] and we'll sort one out for you! Hope it helps.

One final thing: our training slots are approaching full for the Autumn term. No panic, there are still a few dates left, but if there’s anything we can help out with before Christmas - staff training, student or parent sessions - just get in touch.

Alright, that's it. We're done, really and truly. We need a holiday. Enjoy the beach, folks, see you on September 9th - summery vibes to you and yours!

Steve and Martin