The Friday Mindset - Issue #71

December 09, 2022

Last newsletter of 2022!

That's right folks. It's time to bury this flame-out train-wreck of a year once and for all, and crack open a fresh one in the hope things improve.

We've not let standards slip we hope; despite everything else we've got to do before this term expires, we've still managed to pull together some interesting stuff for you this week. Let's get this sad-and-sitting-alone-in-our-classrooms party started!

*sound of single party-popper*

Something to try...

For various reasons that aren't important, we ended up down a research rabbit hole about extrinsic motivation - specifically about whether money motivated improved academic performance.

Spoiler alert; it very much doesn't.

Anyway, we put together a short PowerPoint emphasising this point for a student session recently. We were trying to convince them that it was their intrinsic motivation that would get them through, and they shouldn't rely on external rewards or punishments. We use Daniel Pink's work from Drive here too.

Hope this is useful:

A short powerpoint with clips

And here are the separate links to the two videos;

Something we've been reading...

We've been geeking out over Ashton Kirk Johnston's fantastic study of practice/revision for this week's paper. We've known about this one for ages, referencing it with parents as part of pre-exam information sessions, but we re-read it for a more in-depth session recently and were impressed all-over-again.

Here's a picture of the abstract:

And here's an extract of the bit we really zoomed-in to with folks:

“…learners cannot accurately assess what they have learned or what study techniques will help them learn. [They] must infer how well they are learning on the basis of various cues.

Consider a student preparing for a chemistry exam by re-reading the textbook and doing practice problems. Our student cannot definitively know which of these exercises will yield the best performance on an exam. Future retention can only be inferred from the student’s perceptions.

Many learners appear to use in-the-moment processing fluency to monitor their learning… so learners who encounter difficulty or disfluency in their learning may interpret these struggles as a sign of failure.

‘Ease of processing’ may be misleading in choosing learning strategies. The strategies that produce better long-term retention tend to require more difficult cognitive processing in the short-term. Thus, students who rely on ease of processing to monitor their learning are very likely to be misled about which study strategies yield the most enduring learning.”

Oh yes. This Kirk Johnston kid's gonna go far. The full paper's a dense read but worth it:

Afton Kirk Johnson on students' choices of revision strategies

Our latest offer...

It's a Christmas book giveaway! Wohoo!

This week we've got Cal Newport's Deep Work to post out to one of you. We read this one some years ago, and tune in to Newport's podcast every week so this book's lessons and messages are so deeply ingrained in our psyche we can pretty much recite them in our sleep.

Time to find it a new home. Remember, we give away our own books. These are not new, and not freebies. They're kinda dog-eared actually.

The first person to get in touch at [email protected], say "Me please" and provide a school address gets it. If you're reading this at about 3:30pm on Friday the 9th, you're in with a shout. Go!

And that's it for this year folks. *salutes* Season's greetings and happy holidays to you and yours!

See you in '23,

Steve and Martin