The Friday Mindset - Issue #68

Another week down. We hope it's been a good one for you - it's been crazy busy for us and we're looking forward to kicking back, relaxing and... stressing about our complete absence of present ideas for the winter hols.

Anyway, before you turn your attention to the weekend, check out what we've got for you. If nothing else, we promise you're going to be able to start the most interesting conversations ever as a result of the stuff we've unearthed for you this time. Seriously.

Let's dive in!

Something to try...

This month's theme was all about visualisation and planning beating procrastination... and we found a talk about it, given by a student. This struck us as sufficiently different to explore as a useful reminder to our own learners.

The lad's name is Vikram Nithy and he delivers a pretty stilted presentation punctuated by pauses, nervous silences, clicker issues and note-checking - who wouldn't at that age! In the clip, we've cut the talk so that almost all of the pauses are removed and it flows a little better. He says pretty much exactly what we'd hope he would too, which is a bonus.

Here's the clip. Hope it's useful:

Student Vikram Nithy explores why we procrastinate and how to stop

Something we've been reading...

Two blog posts have really got us thinking this week.

Here's what happened - we were working on a new activity called Another 20 Questions (inspired by our original, 20 Questions from the A Level Mindset) and we stumbled across this really interesting blog post by writer and illustrator Jessica Hagy. We knew of her work through her book How to Be Interesting, but she'd disappeared from our field of vision for a while and this blog was a useful reintroduction.

There are ten great questions here, each with a simple illustration. Check it out:

But maybe, if we asked them more often, we’d be in better places.

The next one we found was from a 'conversation starters' website. There are 200 questions here. Some of them are really superb; they get deeper and more challenging towards the end - particularly the last 10 or so - but it's the kind of blog post you could share with a tutor group and that might trigger an interesting coaching conversation. It's a simple, easy-to-deliver vision activity with plenty of depth and interest. (You could have kids choose a random number and try and answer the question it generates, for example!)

This is the list you are looking for. Loads of engaging and interesting questions to get to know someone better...

Our latest offers...

If you have yet to meet Tony (our IT guru), here's your chance. He will be running sessions on the VESPA platform from 3-5 pm every Tuesday and Thursday until Christmas. Now is an ideal time to do the VESPA questionnaire with your students, so if you'd like to find out more please book a session using the link below:

And we've also got a copy of Dan Coyle's The Culture Code to give away! We recommended this beauty way back in issue 23. Here's what we said about it at the time:

"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."

So there you go. It's time to find a new home for our copy - there's only so much shelf space here. If you're interested, email us at the usual address at around 3:30-4:00 today. First one to do so gets it.

Disclaimer - we don't get given free brand-new books. We buy them, read them, then give them away. This is a second-hand (pre-loved, they call it nowadays...) book!

And that's it for this week. Go and get your shopping started.

All the best to you and yours,

Steve and Martin