The Friday Mindset - Issue #62

September 30, 2022

The working week is dead. Three cheers!

The buses have long since departed, offices have emptied, classrooms are echoing husks and you're pretty much the only one left on campus. (Except for a grumpy cleaner with one of those hinged, v-shaped sweepers that collect discarded crisp packets. Do you think those big v-shaped sweepers have an actual name? The vee-sweeper? The vee-per?)

Aa-nyway let's put aside everyday cares about the nomenclature of cleaning equipment. Brew up and dive in, we've got some good stuff for you this week.

Something to try...

It's the start of a new month tomorrow, so we thought we'd share the next of our monthly challenges.

A reminder of what these are all about! Each month of the academic year from September through to January we've chosen a theme and an accompanying challenge that we plan will became a focus for tutorials and discussions during the course of the month.

We thought the newsletter might be a good place to share what we came up with, so on the first week of each month, we’ll share the theme for the month and a short accompanying PowerPoint; the kind of thing you could present in a fifteen-minute tutorial session and then revisit for discussion and reflection as the month goes on. Each challenge has an intro and clip - followed by an example and a commitment that students have to make.

Check out issue 59 to remind yourself of the September theme: The Environment Design Challenge. So what's October's theme?

We've chosen The 500 Minutes Challenge. This challenge introduces the Pomodoro Technique via a short video featuring New York Times Journalist and Author Nir Eyal, and challenges students to design and commit to a week of 25 Minute Sprints (an activity from The GCSE Mindset that we're actually using more at KS5 than we do at KS4 nowadays!)

It should be a good one for establishing proactive work habits with high levels of concentration. Here it is:

Monthly Challenges copyright Steve Oakes and Martin Griffin [email protected]

Something we've been reading...

We've been investigating the term 'exam wrapper', which seemed to come into parlance in about 2013. Apologies for our ignorance if it's commonly used in your school - this one's new to us. We're at the early stages of digging, but an 'exam wrapper' seems to be a written piece completed by students straight after a test or exam, designed to capture immediate impressions from the student's perspective, based on responses to three questions:

(1) How did you prepare for the exam? (2) What kinds of errors did you make on the exam? and (3) What could you do differently next time?

The thinking is captured in this handy diagram:

It's a neatly expressed and very simple idea. We like it. Here's where we first stumbled across it. There's a pdf that's quite interesting too:

Short article and activity with pdf

Our latest offer...

One more shout out for our newest course: 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. It'd be great to see you there!

And that’s it for now. October is upon us. Soon, Hallowe'en beckons... not that the shops have noticed. Round here, they've just skipped straight to Christmas, meaning we'll be looking at tatty Santas for twelve long weeks...

All the best to you and yours,

Steve and Martin

p.s. Did you know Steve's written a new book? Working with good friend of VESPA, headteacher Katherine Muncaster, he's been exploring all things Mental Toughness. It's out in November and can be pre-ordered here:

Buy Mental Toughness: Practical classroom activities to help young people cope with stress, challenge and change by Muncaster, Katherine, Oakes, Steve (ISBN: 9781398354470)

p.p.s And did you know Martin's written a new book as well? Snowbound highland thriller The Second Stranger is coming January 2023 from Sphere. It can be pre-ordered here:

Buy The Second Stranger: One detective. One murderer. But which is which? by Griffin, Martin (ISBN: 9781408725221)