The Friday Mindset - Issue #65

October 21, 2022

Happy Friday! It's here at last. Half term! *weeps silently with barely suppressed joy*

Just before you make your weary way home - take ten minutes. Stick around, brew up, and see what we've dug up for you this week. It's good stuff:

Something to try...

For us, this is the time of year that negative self-talk begins to rear its ugly head. How can we help students who tell us, "everything's falling apart" or "I'll never be any good at this"? One way is to model the reframing of negative thoughts with more positive replacements. And this week's resource is one of the best examples we've seen of this in action.

It's the work of Croatian Marvel comic artist Tonci Zonjic. Between 2016 and 2017 he created a series of cartoons called Not/But, that take a negative phrase, the 'not' and replace it with a positive one, the 'but'.

Each image features an artist attempting to draw, and struggling with self-sabotaging thoughts. (Replace 'drawing' with 'studying' and you're up and running.) On the website, each image contains only the 'not' until you click on it, then the 'but' appears. It's great for kids to guess/suggest what the positive replacement should be before you reveal it. Warning: there's some salty language in some of them - 13 rows of pictures in all, watch out for swears in rows 2, 5, 8, 9, 11. Those aside, it could be a fun, enjoyable and instructive fifteen-minute activity! Here's an example image:

The link to the whole website is below. It's such a generous, helpful thing for an artist to do, we really recommend you explore it. (We wanted to support the guy's work so we just bought a print of all the Not/Buts in one picture):

I have secretly made a prototype of a poker-sized deck and am looking into production of it on a larger scale — it will likely be a crowdfunded thing instead of an open edition, so if you would like to be notified if and when it is available, please sign up below.

Something we've been reading...

If you read last week's letter you'll know we’re digging into a huge study written by academics at the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Mass., 2014). It's epic. The full text can be accessed here, but we’re going through it and sharing things as we extract them, turning them into short word documents.

A quick overview: the paper looks at barriers to educational success in the American school system. To use the authors’ own words, “…we classified barriers into four general categories: 1) some students focus too much on the present, 2) some rely too much on routine, 3) some focus too much on negative identities, and 4) mistakes are more likely with many options or with little information.”

There are interesting observations under each heading. We’ll pick out the stuff that grabs us as we go along. This week's section is about short and long-term thinking. We found it really well-expressed and interesting.

Just two sides of A4 for you here:

Short word doc

Our latest offer...

A quick reminder of our free session... 45 minutes covering the theory and practice of motivating students. It will include 5 unpublished VESPA activities for you to try. It’s quick, free and (hopefully) useful! We’re planning on keeping it pretty small so don’t worry, there won’t be loads of us - a maximum of around twenty we're guessing? Here are the details:

An introduction to the theory and practice of motivation

Tuesday 8th November, 3:45-4:30pm

via Zoom.

For a meeting ID and passcode, email us at i[email protected].

And that's it for this week, folks. Have a great - and no doubt well-deserved - half-term break. We'll be back on the first Friday of the next half term with the November challenge.

All the best to you and yours,

Steve and Martin