The Friday Mindset - Issue #61

September 23, 2022

Happy Friday!

Brew up, fellow travellers, we've got some high-quality bits-and-bobs for you this week, all stemming from a chance encounter with a TED talk. (Basically, that's the origin story for every assembly Steve's ever delivered :-) )

Put your feet up, take a moment to calm yourself, and settle in for a quiet, thoughtful five minutes before the weekend begins. After all, someone's got to do the thinking around here and you're the best qualified.

Enjoy!

Something to try...

We've been looking at the work of Australian Douglas Barton, who's TED X talk fascinated us. In the talk, Barton explores three things high-performing students do differently to others. Right up our alley as you can imagine.

One was taking practice tests, as anyone familiar with John Dunlosky's work will be aware of. We're going to deal with this one right here right now by sharing the clip of Barton speaking with you. We've edited this back a little for the sake of brevity, so you get a quick and clear introduction to Barton's findings. He reports back on the revision behaviours of year 11s preparing for their GCSEs and you can see the slide he refers to during the talk, but you may want a picture of it as well. Here's the picture:

Remember - this is, according to Barton, a week before the exams; the time students should be engaging in high utility revision! Disastrous stuff. Anyway, here's the clip itself:

A short clip about the power of practice tests

September's a good time to introduce the power of practice testing - a habit developed early in year 11, 12 or 13 is one that could reap rewards as the year goes on. We're going to have our students design tests for each other, and then take them and feedback- a basic approach but hey we've only had a moment to think about it so far...

We'll share more of Barton's findings in the weeks ahead.

Something we're reading...

This Edutopia article on designing better tests is a goldmine of interesting observations, studies and links.

What's more, it's a pretty quick-and-easy read if you're feeling wiped at the end of a long week; written in the kind of way that suggests to us that students might be able to explore sections of it and present their findings back to a class or tutor group.

Check it out:

A review of a dozen recent studies reveals that to design good tests, teachers need to consider bias, rigor, and mindset.

Our latest offer...

Tony (our IT guru) has been running training sessions on the VESPA Academy platform for the last two weeks. If you've missed these sessions and would like a one-to-one to help you get set up, then please get in touch at [email protected].

One other thing: in the summer we ran a course for Network for Learning that went really well, so they've asked us to do it again. It's called Building Towards Exam Success and it features 15 VESPA activities - some old, most new - as a curriculum of sessions to build up to exams. It's great for years 11, 12 and 13 in particular. It's an online, two-and-a-half hour session running on November 30th, and you can get all the details here.

And that's it for now. Friday night beckons! Pizza and a movie? A glass of good red wine? A punishing run? Whatever it is that floats your boat, go do it.

All the best to you and yours,

Steve and Martin

p.s. a very generous recent email:

"I have run INSETs for six years and I have never booked a speaker who has had such an immediate impact on the way we teach. All the staff have bought in and are already using VESPA with our students."

Very gracious words. We're booked-up for in-person training until January 2023, but if you'd like to get in touch about sessions, let us know at [email protected].