The Friyay Mindset - Issue #19

June 18, 2021

An hour ago, the buildings were abuzz with the lively conversations and speculations of enquiring young minds. Now there's no one left except a couple of dodgy geezers vaping behind the bike sheds and a hacked-off member of the site team pushing a mop. It can mean only one thing: it's newsletter time!

There are lots of new folk joining every week so a quick recap: 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 at Attitude. We've been doing a lot of sessions with staff and school leaders who want to try and change the narrative around 'lost learning' and 'the covid generation' - and who can blame them; these are precisely the stories students will return to, cling to and retell when work gets hard and exams approach. Attitude activities can be useful in helping reframe here.

Here’s something to try…

OK - as you know, these activities are all new. Today’s, Making Luck, has been an interesting one to develop. We've run a number of sessions on proactivity recently. Ever tried defining proactivity in an educational context? We think there's an element (among other things) of opportunity awareness, opportunity creation and hypothesis testing.

By that we mean proactive, high attitude students (i) have a broad attentional spotlight and see opportunities when they occur (ii) they work to create opportunities if none are presented to them and (iii) if they have a hunch/feeling about a possibility or idea, they test this hypothesis by having a go at it.

Making Luck is an activity that tries to encourage these qualities. It references Professor Richard Wiseman's work (see below). It's designed as a starting point for exploring opportunity awareness and needs some frameworking and contextualising. The site we suggest at the start, www.oodlesof.info, is OK, but hasn't been significantly updated we wrote the resource, so there are further suggestions too and you may need to add some of your own. The list of possibilities presented at the end is - excuse the juxtaposition - only the beginning.

Enjoy!

Here’s something we’ve been reading…

Prof Wiseman's The Luck Factor has its own page here, so you can perhaps explore this with students and discuss its content:

This research involves developing techniques to boost wellbeing and success, including happiness, relationships, productivity and leadership. Perhaps the best known aspect of this work involved a decade-long project that identified the psychological principles used by lucky people to create their good fortune. The Luck Factor This research has involved working with hundreds of exceptionally lucky…

You can also hear Wiseman discuss his work on Radio 4's The Life Scientific here:

Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

And you can use the following super-short clip from a TV interview to introduce the study:

Here’s our latest offer…

If you’d like to hear about how to implement VESPA at scale, we are running a free session on Tuesday 22nd at 3.20ish (we're likely to start properly at 3:45pm.) Last week we said we'd keep the sessions small but this one's got away from us a bit and now there are about 20 people on it. (Sorry!)

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