The Friyay Mindset - Issue #18

June 11, 2021

The staff car park is emptying as colleagues bolt for distant beer gardens, the site team are litter picking, and the staffroom microwave pings as an overworked head of department finally gets round to having the soup they brought in for lunch. It can mean only one thing; it's home-time on Friday. Barricade your office door, break open that pack of Skittles you confiscated from a year 8, and put your feet up. 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’re going to look again at Practice.

Here’s something to try…

OK - as you know, these activities are all new. Today’s, Closed-Book Notetaking, has gone down well every time we've tried it, in part because it takes a low utility revision technique that students are inexplicably loyal too - reading whilst highlighting - and it adds to it a high-utility revision technique they do much more rarely - practice testing.

This combination of low and high utility has worked well for our students; rather than explicitly banning revision techniques we know have very little subsequent effect on results (reading notes, highlighting key terms) we ask learners to combine this familiar technique with something much more challenging and effective.

Like last letter’s resource, Test Your Future Self, this is 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… you get the picture.

Here’s something we’ve been reading…

This paper is a classic. Jeff Karpicke and Janell Blunt, at Purdue University, Indiana, looked at four practice techniques to assess which ones had the biggest impact on subsequent test performance. The techniques they chose were:

  1. reading a text once

  2. reading a text once then 'concept mapping' (essentially, making a mindmap of the contents)

  3. reading a text four times (they call this 'repeat study')

  4. reading a text once then completing a test of recall.

We give you the results in the activity. It's fascinating stuff, and it has big implications for how we model effective revision and practice.

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....

Folks, if this offer looks familiar, it's because we told you about it last week and set a date for this week just gone. And you got in touch explaining how TAG deadlines are ruining your lives and you haven't got time. So we're going to reschedule.

We like to keep these sessions really small so we can talk properly and answer questions, so we'll likely spread them out over the next few weeks. So the next one is on: Tuesday 22nd at 3.20ish.

If you’d like to attend, drop us an email at [email protected] and we will email you a Zoom link.

Cheers all. Have a great weekend!

Steve and Martin