The Friyay Mindset - Issue #26

October 01, 2021

It's Friday! Up and down the country it's been open evening week, and we're all exhausted but here it is, the weekend has arrived in a spectacular trail of glory. Not a moment too soon.

We don't know about you, but our organisation skills often start to suffer around about the turn of October so we've been clearing desk drawers, actioning long-forgotten tasks, returning confiscated items to kids who'd forgotten we'd taken them, and tidying. This means 2 things:

(i) we're at inbox zero. If you've sent an email that hasn't had a reply, please hit us up again - there's been a technical issue. And more importantly...

(ii) we found two spare copies of The GCSE Mindset Student Workbook knocking about. The first two people to email us get their hands on them. (One each, not both!) All you have to do is fire an email off now (like NOW) giving us your work address and we'll stick 'em in the post to you next week. Bonus.

Ohhh-kay, let's dive in

Something to try...

In the last of our issues about the #100behaviours, we cover Attitude. Here are the 20 most common behaviours we've seen associated with high attitude students. We won't repeat the same introduction we have for the other elements of the model; you know the drill by now.

Hopefully these will start some really useful conversations!

Something we've been reading...

We saw Francis Flynn and Vanessa Bohn's paper crop up in our timeline recently and were immediately impressed by the readability of the Cornell University research contained there. The paper studies the process of asking for help in a university setting, beginning with a set of micro-experiments in which graduates had to ask for directions around campus (they massively underestimated how helpful people were willing to be), and help filling out questionnaires (again, the participants thought they'd get very little help, and were surprised by how easy it was.)

The piece is good on why we assume people don't want to help us, and explains why once someone has helped us, they're more likely to do so a second time, rather than less. It's going to come as news to a lot of GCSE and post-16 students!

Asking for help confidently seems to us to be a typical high attitude trait, and this is one of those papers that could handily be chopped into sections and distributed among a tutor group to read, digest and feedback. Our immediate thought was how well it would go with an attitude activity from the GCSE Mindset called Network Audits (One we use with post 16 learners as well as at KS4.)

Here’s our latest offer…

We're delighted to let you know we're running a training day in central London on December 14th. We love these days; they run 10-3, we cover the model (with new activities as well as some old favourites as examples) we look at coaching students (with new material here too) and we cover implementation (including successful approaches we've seen in schools across the UK and abroad.)

It's an exciting one for us, particularly after two years in which it's been very hard to run face-to-face training in a room together. There's nothing quite like the connections, ideas and possibilities that arise when fellow professionals get together and leave behind the whirlwind of the day job.

We'll be advertising the session on Twitter soon enough, but we wanted to give newsletter readers the opportunity to book their places first. We keep them small so there's plenty of opportunity to discuss individual contexts. There's only 15 places and it's the only course we will be running this year.

And here's another thing: we wanted you all to get the chance to shape the day. If there's anything you'd like us to cover or anything you need clarification on... let us know, and if there's a theme emerging that needs addressing, we'll make sure it's in the plan for December 14th. (Of course there'll be time for questions too, so you'll get the chance to unpick any issues you might have.)

Here's the link:

Eventbrite - Steve Oakes & Martin Griffin presents VESPA - Full Day (London Course) - Tuesday, December 14, 2021 at Union Jack Club, London, England. Find event and ticket information.

And a reminder; we’ve developed a one-hour crash course in teaching the best revision techniques to students. It’s a session for teachers; it’s evidence-informed, quick and clear, and it comes with 5 new practice activities we’ve written and trialled in the past year, as well as a PowerPoint of useful slides, many of which can be used directly with students. And it's all free!

We’re going to fly through the new material on Zoom for you, on Wednesday 6th October at 3:45pm. It’s free. Get in touch if you want the Zoom link. (Thanks so much to those who've already done so! You should have had the link sent through by email.)

Alright folks, that's it for this week. We're going to celebrate the weekend with a couple of chilled beers and a vast serving of dry roasted peanuts. Or is it a couple of dry roasted peanuts and a vast serving of chilled beer? Hmmm.

Steve and Martin

p.s.

We've not recently mentioned Tim Ferriss' use of 'the jar of awesome'. Yes its title is naff as hell... but when we've suggested this attitude trick to particular students - the ones we felt we're in the right frame of mind for it, and needed it most - it's really worked.

If you think you've got a student who might need a way to celebrate small wins and strengthen optimism, show them this short clip:

Tim Ferriss shares one of his biggest secrets to staying creative & motivated: celebrating the small wins and rewarding yourself along the way. Watch the ful...