The Friyay Mindset - Issue #17

May 28, 2021

Hey! It’s Friday. The car park is empty. A crisp packet skitters down an echoey corridor in the direction of the science labs. The cleaning team eyeball you meaningfully whilst waiting at your classroom door with mops and buckets… it all points to one thing. The week is over and it’s time for the newsletter.

At the moment, we're taking some time to look at transition through the lens of VESPA, making some observations and suggestions under each element of the model, and sharing some new activities. This week we'll look at Practice.

Here’s something to try…

OK - as you know, these activities are all new. Today's, Test Your Future Self, has been around a while and has gone down really well whenever we've used it, so give it a try. It'll need some explicit modelling first (more about modelling in a sec!) but once the students have the idea, it should provide a serious boost to those who choose to use it.

It's a great transition activity, which we think puts a flag in the ground for you: this is a new year/key stage; we're going to do things differently; we're evidence-based; our expectations of your independence have changed... etc.

Here’s something we’ve been reading…

This paper, from Goethe University Frankfurt - an institution that has produced 20 Nobel Prize winners - explores the notion of explicit versus implicit instruction in year 9 Maths teachers.

Explicit instruction directly models a metacognitive strategy or technique (the teacher explicitly demonstrates a technique for time-management or a revision technique for example) and "students are given some information about the meaning and importance of that strategy"; ie how useful and effective it can be.

Implicit instruction models a technique indirectly as part of an activity without drawing attention to it or foregrounding its usefulness as a study strategy. This is interesting stuff for us because we're all about explicit instruction, and the researchers find that in classroom situations, teachers favour implicit instruction - 85% of strategies and techniques were modelled implicitly compared to 15% explicitly.

But the winner for impact on student performance? Explicit instruction.

More here:

Here's our latest offer...

You might have read the books, delivered a few VESPA activities to your students, and seen the impact they've had, but how do you scale that to a department, whole year group, key stage, or even a school? The EEF claims that 'implementation is a key aspect of what schools do to improve, and yet it is a domain of school practice that rarely receives sufficient attention. We would agree with this statement and it's something we've been developing for a number of years. So, if you'd like to hear about how to implement at scale, we are running a free session on 10th June at 3.35pm. If you'd like to attend, drop us an email at [email protected] and we will email you a zoom link.

It looks like the sun is finally here! So, have a fantastic weekend - and indeed half term break - and enjoy the well earned rest.

Steve & Martin