The Friday Mindset - Issue #66

Welcome back folks! And a warm welcome to you, Friday, sneaking in late as usual. It's the beginning of a new month so we're kicking this week off with our November Challenge, which is all about procrastination... hope you enjoy.

Oh, and a quick heads up re. training: we're full until April 2023 now, so if you're in charge of CPD - or you know someone who is - and you'd like a visit from Martin, Steve or both (that last option is a rarity these days but still occasionally happens!) do let us know. The summer dates will start filling up in the next month or two.

Right, down to business, let's dive in.

Something to try...

It’s the start of a new month 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 become 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.

Check out issue 59 to remind yourself of the September theme: The Environment Design Challenge, and issue 62 to remind you of the October theme: The 500 Minutes Challenge. So what’s November’s theme?

It's Planning beats Procrastination. Yes, November's that time (or is it always that time?) when students start putting off challenging tasks. This month's activity introduces types of procrastination, then uses the advice of teacher and science-communicator Vanessa Hill to tackle it. There are a couple of interesting videos about visualisation as well. Check it out:

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

Something we're reading...

We're only a hundred pages into this one and it's already really exciting. Laura Vanderkam's 'Tranquility by Tuesday (9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters)' is an account of a time-management experiment. Participants - all of whom volunteered because they felt overwhelmed and constantly frazzled/exhausted - were asked to take part in a nine-week project. Each week had a particular focus with a lesson attached. The book is an account of what happened and how subjects responded as they worked these lessons into their lives.

The nine lessons are inspiring, simple, and easy to implement. This picture should capture the general spirit; it's the introduction to lesson 6, 'One Big Adventure, One Little Adventure':

The whole book is getting us fired up! It's good stuff. Check it out here:

"Tranquility by Tuesday" explores nine tried-and-true ways to build opportunities for joy, nourishment, and fulfillment into your schedule.

Our latest offer...

Last call for 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. There won’t be loads of us. Here are the details:

An introduction to the theory and practice of motivation

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

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

And that's it for this week. Good to get that first post-break week out of the way. Now the charge to the winter break begins. Enjoy your weekend!

All the best to you and yours,

Steve and Martin

p.s.

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!