The Friday Mindset
By Steve Oakes & Martin Griffin
issues
The Friday Mindset - Issue #38
Something to try...We've been looking at motivating students for upcoming tests, exams and challenges by asking them to try and write down their 'why'. Why is it they're working hard? What positive outcomes might they expect as a result, and are they magnetic…
The Friday Mindset - Issue #37
Something to try...Runshaw College are an outstanding FE college in Lancashire that use VESPA across their courses. Recently, they've been discussing it at their CPD sessions and via their Youtube channel.A couple of things struck us as interesting in the sho…
The Friday Mindset - Issue #36
Something to try...January is the classic time for re-exploring vision. Assemblies about new year's resolutions, personal 30-day challenges, all the good stuff that communicates culture, expectation and direction.If you're interested in exploring 30 day chall…
The Friday Mindset - Issue #35
Something we've been reading...The image above really grabbed us! It's the work of Professor Kathryn Stanger-Hall at The University of Georgia. She's a plant biologist and her study explores approaches to test preparation in Biology classes but the implicatio…
The Friday Mindset - Issue #34
Something we've been reading...Prof Robert Coe's Great Teaching Toolkit: Evidence Review is widely available and has been an essential read since we saw Coe discuss the findings during a webinar earlier in the year. The report is separated into four sections …
The Friday Mindset - Issue #33
With that in mind, we've put together a powerpoint for you. It's star is Australian designer, artist and Youtuber Campbell Walker. It's clipped from a longer video of his. If you want to watch the full video it's here, but we've filleted the most relevant bit…
The Friday Mindset - Issue #32
We have more on this next week - including a PowerPoint for you to use, so watch out for it... and take a look at our offer below.Something we've been reading....This is a very old paper. Easily older than most of you, we reckon, since it's based on data coll…
The Friday Mindset - Issue #31
It's Friday!All across the campus, staff are packing their bags and trudging wearily towards their family saloons. But not us. Oh no, we're sticking around for a brainstorming session that includes a vision activity and powerpoint, a difficult question about …
The Friday Mindset - Issue #30
Our latest offer(s)...OK - the niche one first. Did you know the Martin-half of VESPA is a novelist? Well it's true. And he's co-written a textbook about teaching narrative writing in KS3, 4 and 5 English classrooms. It's called Storycraft; 51 tried-and-teste…
The Friday Mindset - Issue #29
It's half-term Friday!And you're still here, loitering on campus? Really? Well you're not alone! All across the country, solitary folk just like you have been left behind as fleet-footed colleagues speed pubwards. We salute you.Just before you go for your wel…
The Friday Mindset - Issue #28
p.s. a bad joke to accompany this session: "Time is a great teacher. (pause for dramatic effect) Unfortunately, it kills all its students." Ho ho.
The Friday Mindset - Issue #27
If you'd like a little more, we have a short five-slide powerpoint to share, including an email outline for students to use so they can confidently get in touch with a professional. Say hello at info@vespa.academy if you'd like a copy!
The Friyay Mindset - Issue #26
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 hel…
The Friyay Mindset - Issue #25
Here’s something we’ve been reading…We've referred to this paper in our training sessions before; Kelli Taylor and Doug Rohrer's study of revision for Maths tests. It's only a small study, but it looks at interleaving versus blocked practice and the findings …
The Friyay Mindset - Issue #24
A big welcome to new subscribers. It's great to see numbers growing every week. (There's over a hundred more of you since the last few days of the summer term!) We hope you're finding the material useful.Normally this would be the point at which we wrote a ch…
The Friyay Mindset - Issue #23
Here’s something we’ve been reading…Higher levels of academic effort often come as the result of culture; that unseen network of shared beliefs, values and expectations that seems to be emitted in every corridor, conversation and lesson.A great book on cultur…
The Friyay Mindset - Issue #22
Here’s something we’ve been reading…Gary Latham and Edwin Locke's work seems to be foundational in terms of goal-setting and its relation to performance. It's elderly stuff - the paper we've been digging into was published when we were regular attendees at th…
The Friyay Mindset - Issue #21
Here’s something we’ve been reading…Not that we've 'been reading', more that 'we've been listening to'. BBC Sounds have produced a five-part series fronted by Amol Rajan called Re-Think; a series examining how the pandemic has caused paradigm shifts in public…
The Friyay Mindset - Issue #20
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 he…
The Friyay Mindset - Issue #19
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 t…