The A Level Mindset

40 activities for transforming student commitment, motivation and productivity

Steve Oakes, Martin Griffin

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781785830242
• eBook ISBN: 9781785830525
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In The A Level Mindset, Steve Oakes and Martin Griffin share the secrets of coaching students to develop the characteristics, habits and mindsets which will help them realise their potential. Those students who make real and sustained progress at A level aren't necessarily the ones with superb GCSEs. Some students leap from average results aged 16 to outstanding results aged 18. Others seem to hit a ceiling. But why? It was in trying to answer this question that the VESPA system emerged. Steve and Martin have cut through the noise surrounding character development and identified five key characteristics that all students need to be successful: vision, effort, systems, practice and attitude. These characteristics beat cognition hands down. Successful students approach their studies with the right behaviours, skills and attitudes: they understand how to learn and revise effectively, they're determined and organised, they give more discretionary effort and they get top results. Success at A level is a result of character, not intelligence. Much has been written about growth mindsets and character development in recent years, but teachers are still left wondering how to apply these ideas in their contexts: how can these theories help learners in practice? Taking cues from the work of Peter Clough, Carol Dweck and Angela Lee Duckworth, and informed by their collective 30 plus years of teaching and coaching, Steve and Martin have spent years researching how character and behaviours affect student outcomes in their sixth form. After identifying the core traits that contributed to student success, they developed practical activities to help every student develop the A Level Mindset. Discover 40 concrete, practical and applicable tools and strategies that will supercharge learners' ambition, organisation, productivity, persistence and determination. Suitable for teachers, tutors, heads of sixth form or anyone else who wants to help A level students achieve their potential, The A Level Mindset offers 40 easy-to-use activities to develop students' resilience, commitment, buoyancy, motivation and determination. It could be your key to transforming student outcomes.

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Chapter 1. Vision

When goal pursuit is fueled by personal endorsement and valuing of the goal, commitment and persistence will be high. Ntoumanis et al. (2014), p. 226

What is Vision?

We’ve all had those frustrating conversations that begin, ‘What do you want to do with your life?’ It’s a difficult question to answer; indeed, some students might not be able to answer this question for many years. We don’t believe that vision always has to be linked to having a clear career path. On the simplest level, it’s about knowing the outcomes you want to achieve.

Our research found that students without a goal or vision hit a ceiling and underperform by about one grade. Students who don’t have a clear outcome, who don’t know why they’re doing A levels, are usually the first to show decreased levels of effort when the going gets tough. Studies support this view: some researchers argue that setting a goal which is specific and challenging leads to increases in productivity (Locke and Latham, 1984).

We believe there are three parts to vision. First, it’s about having a clear goal that you want to achieve. Goal setting has been used in just about every field of life – from sport to business – to improve human productivity and potential.

Second, it’s about making an actionable plan. Arguably, the aspect of goal setting that is 14most often neglected is making a specific action plan. By breaking the goals down into subcomponents and then identifying actions needed to achieve these, students are more likely to maintain motivation.

Finally, vision is about the voluntary continuation of goal-directed action. This means sticking to the goal despite any obstacles or difficulties that arise. As mentioned in the introduction, this is what Duckworth et al. (2007) call ‘grit’.

Are Target Grades Goals?

Our initial observations on vision were straightforward: students with clear goals tended to outperform those without, we saw, year after year. Our response was understandably pragmatic – let’s ensure all students have a goal. So we asked them each to write down the grades that represented success for them. Following a meeting with us they could adjust the target grade against which their progress was monitored (although not downwards). Soon, we removed low target grades from our tracking systems. The past didn’t equal the future, and, anyway, it became clear that nobody wanted an E grade. We ensured that target grades didn’t change during the course of the two years, unless the student wanted them to. We introduced A* targets in Year 12, rather than springing them on students later. All of this helped, but we were missing the bigger picture: the answer to the question ‘Why are these grades important to you?’

Ownership and Finding the Why

We knew the ownership piece of the puzzle was crucial, but that was where the journey became much tougher. There are some uncomfortable truths living here. Target-setting and relentless intervention with our ‘underperformers’, not because they wanted it but because we did, was problematic. Sure, there was a cultural component, we debated – we needed to have ambition for them even if they didn’t – but we knew there was more to it. The locus of control must lie as much with the individual as it does with the teacher’s hopes and expectations. Otherwise we risk creating passive consumers of learning who wait for support rather than seek it, then blame the institution for their poor grades. They might physically be there in the classroom, but they are not yet psychologically enrolled in the process of learning. People are all the same in this regard – we need to create and express our why.

So there’s a balance to be struck between relentless intervention and intrinsic motivation: a space in which students are challenged, supported and encouraged to explore their why and learn how to set effective and inspiring goals. 15

Be/Have Goals and Do Goals

Our initial forays into encouraging A level students to explore their whys yielded confusing results. Whereas some would say ‘I plan on studying criminal law’ or ‘I really want to work in teaching’, others opted for (and these are all true) ‘I want to be famous’, ‘I’m going to be a professional footballer’, ‘I just want to be rich’, ‘I’m going to be a lifestyle influencer’ or ‘I want a Lexus.’

We struggled to deal with these kinds of goals until we discovered the work of three academic researchers working across two universities. Beattie, Laliberté and Oreopoulos’s 2016 paper Thrivers and Divers made manifest a number of issues we were seeing with these types of goal. In brief, they took a representative sample of first-year undergraduate students doing economics at the University of Toronto and asked them to fill in questionnaires about how hard they worked, the number of hours’ part-time work they did per week, and crucially, the sorts of goals they had for the year ahead. The entry requirements are rigorous, and so the students on the course were all sparky high achievers. At the end of the year, the researchers compared the questionnaires of the students in the bottom 10% for academic performance (the ‘divers’) with those in the top 10% (the ‘thrivers’). There were some interesting outcomes regarding effort, but it was the goal setting that stood out for us.

Here are some of the goals set by the divers: ‘be rich’, ‘get rich quickly’, ‘being successful’, ‘having so many successful businesses’, ‘have my own company’, ‘have my own house and car’, ‘receive a high level of education’.

And here is a selection of thriver goals: ‘build something’, ‘… contribute to the human advancement of …’, ‘fix people’s problems’, ‘[be] an independent person who can deal with problems’, ‘working in the field of computer science’, ‘build a strong foundation to succeed’ (Beattie et al., 2016, p. 46, p. 49, p. 50 and p. 51).

It was the active nature of the latter that struck us. These thriver goals are what we refer to as ‘do goals’; they place emphasis on an active verb – building, contributing, working – and focus the mind on the process, not the outcome. The diver goals, on the other hand, were ones – as our own examples show – that emphasise an outcome. We refer to them as ‘be’ or ‘have’ goals: they’re about money, security, power or fame as the product of some unspecified process. Be and have goals are strongly correlated with poor academic performance. Correlation, as we know, is not causation; however, in the study, goals were set before the course began. It strikes us as extremely unlikely that the students who were in the process of diving went back to their goals and changed them. 16

Dream vs. Goal – or the Last-Taken Action

Entrepreneur and writer Derek Sivers has an interesting idea about setting goals and taking subsequent action. He argues that goals aren’t about changing the future; they’re about changing the present. ‘If a goal doesn’t change your actions in the present moment … then it’s not a good goal, no matter how impressive it seems,’ he said in a recent interview (Martin, 2019).

One thing that seemed to help us distinguish between successful and unsuccessful goals was exploring a student’s last-taken action; ‘Describe something you have just done that makes attaining this goal more likely.’ This question allowed us to make a distinction between dreams and goals. Students who took no action were enjoying the safety of dreaming. There’s no...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Vision
• Chapter 2. Effort
• Chapter 3. Systems
• Chapter 4. Practice
• Chapter 5. Attitude
• Chapter 6. Coaching
• Chapter 7. Making it Happen
• Conclusion: Ten Final Thoughts
• References
• Index
• Copyright
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