The Friyay Mindset - Issue #20

June 25, 2021

It's Friday at last. Monday was literally the longest day of the year - and this week has felt as if it's been the longest week, what with bubbles bursting left right and centre, outbreaks springing up, and grades being challenged by irate parents. What a relief to see the weekend on the horizon.

Anyway, put your feet up and grab a coffee. Let's dive straight in. Over the last few weeks we've been obsessing about transition - what a successful transition into a new academic year group looks like in these crazy times. A lot of our student work has been about transition over the last few weeks; we've done student sessions on proactivity and curiosity recently, and as you read this, we'll have just finished our session at the 2021 Festival of Education, a short fifty-minuter called "Metacognition, Motivation and Proactivity in the KS4 Classroom."

Over the last few weeks we've been sharing new activities that have transition in mind; these are activities that emphasise fresh challenges and ramp up expectations for a new key stage or year. They're optimistic (we hope!) and will feel unfamiliar to students, helping us underscore the new demands associated with the next phase of their education.

Here’s something to try…

Today's activity, like last week's, is about attitude. We've had some great feedback on last week's session - one member of staff was almost bouncing off the walls as she told us how super-enthused she'd been as she explored it with her tutor group - and hopefully this week's session should get students reflecting on the opportunities that face them, and the attitude with which they should approach a new year.

This activity was written in 2015, but never found its way into any of the books. Consequently we've run this hundreds of times, unlike some of the others we've been sharing. It's one that always gets them thinking...

Here’s something we’ve been reading…

Be More Pirate has been a real influence on our attitude since we read it in 2019. In it, Sam Conniff Allende makes a case for operating in a more rebellious, piratical way - challenging the orthodox way of doing things, questioning why our systems are designed the way they are, and encouraging us the rip up the manual and try something daring and different.

Reading it reminded us of the times we found ourselves doing this in the years we worked in schools together - asking small but important questions like, Why isn't there a reward system for 6th formers? Why do we write long prose reports about student progress for parents, that students then don't read or act upon? Why do teachers diligently record the content of coaching conversations but students don't? Why do we write extensive feedback at the end of submitted work for some students but very little for others?

Be More Pirate is a great book for those of us who want to interrogate 'the way we do things around here' and make changes that improve what we offer, and how we work.

Be More Pirate is the debut book by Sam Conniff, published in 2018 by Penguin Random House. In the year that followed its publication, thousands of modern ‘pirates’ from around the world have brought the ideas to life with their own rebellions.

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 Monday 28th at 3.20ish (we’re likely to start properly at 3:45pm.) This was meant to happen last Tuesday, but we ended up dealing with a Zoom-meltdown at just the wrong moment. Apologies!

We think we've got in touch with everybody to give them the new date and time. 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 well-deserved rest this weekend,

Steve and Martin