Oakes / Griffin VESPA Handbook

40 new activities to boost student commitment, motivation and productivity
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78583-720-3
Verlag: Crown House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

The Vespa Handbook builds on the success of Steve and Martin's acclaimed books, The A Level Mindset and The GCSE Mindset, by introducing 40 new activities that will help teachers improve the grades of their students. The handbook is a perfect introduction to the VESPA approach, as well as a practical addition to previous resources. Just like their previous books, The Vespa Handbook will help teachers develop the five key characteristics and behaviours that students need in order to regulate their own learning: vision, effort, systems, practice and attitude. When it comes to achieving academic success, these characteristics are crucial. The ability of students to have a vision, commit the effort, be organised, practise and revise well and have a positive attitude and good work ethic are vital to their success. The 40 activities included are set out clearly and categorised thematically under the VESPA umbrella, making them easy to navigate and use in any setting. Each activity can be delivered one-to-one, to a tutor group or to a whole cohort, and is designed to take fifteen to twenty minutes to complete. These activities will help your students to set goals, work more efficiently, organise their resources and manage their workload. The Vespa Handbook will empower learners to unlock their potential, overcome obstacles and take control of their own knowledge and skills. It has been written with students in mind and includes spaces for them to record and reflect on their answers and organise their thought process. The book offers a comprehensive toolkit of study techniques, strategies and approaches that can be applied for effective learning, planning, organization and execution. Steve and Martin share practical advice and valuable insights for teachers looking to improve their students' resilience and ambition, based on their combined 40-plus years of experience in teaching and coaching. Suitable for teachers, tutors and parents who want to boost academic outcomes in 14-18-year-olds and equip them with powerful tools and techniques in preparation for further education and employment.

Steve Oakes has 20 years of experience as a teacher in the UK and the UAE. Prior to his current position, Steve was the assistant director of sixth form at The Blue Coat School in Oldham, where he worked with his co-author, Martin Griffin, for eight years. He is currently the founding head of sixth form at Hartland International School, Dubai.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Oakes, Steve

Griffin, Martin

Leseproben

1. Vision

If you have high control over the outcome, there’s no need to have general goals – you can afford to get specific. But if you have low control over the outcome, general might be better.

Vision: the level of goal awareness and goal orientation shown by a student; their growing understanding of their reasons for studying, and their developing sense of what success might look like for them.

What Do We See When Vision is Low?

Like any of the metacognitive characteristics in the VESPA model, vision is not a fixed, unwavering element of personality. We can’t dismiss low-vision students as permanently impossible to motivate. Students’ levels of vision, goal orientation or dedication are malleable. They change in response to circumstances, culture, events in personal or family life, conversations, sudden epiphanies or exciting lessons.

When vision is missing, we’ll see proxies for it that might include some or all of the following behaviours. Students might seem disengaged or bored. They might have little awareness or understanding of why education benefits them or what success might look like for them. They may have few or no ideas about how education opens doors to certain careers, or they might have no access to alumni programmes which clearly and persuasively show them where last year’s students ended up. They might have begun to feel exasperated with themselves and others, envious of those who seem dedicated and feel the first tremors of a growing anxiety: what am I doing this for? Why are others enjoying this and I’m not? Is there something wrong with me? They might be firm believers in the passion myth; since they don’t yet know that passion for something arrives as a result of growing mastery, they hunt around, convinced that if they could just find the one thing they’re passionate about, everything will be OK again.

It’s a complicated cocktail of difficult feelings. But we can help low-vision students navigate themselves through them.

Research Spotlight: What the Evidence Indicates

Let’s focus on one important element of vision: goal setting. Evidence for goals positively impacting on performance is interesting to explore because not all research finds that students who set goals necessarily perform better.

For example, studies with young primary school pupils sometimes find little impact from goal setting, which we might expect when we consider their only gradually developing ability to defer gratification. But even with students of high school age, the research isn’t unequivocal. One of the reasons could be the type of goal students set. For a quick – and, it’s important to note, hugely simplified – summary of just some of the different types of goals students often set themselves, consider the following list. (The labels are all used in the literature around goal setting, but the student quotes and the order in which the types of goal are presented are ours.)

Achievement goals focus on seeking a positive outcome:

• Performance goals: ‘I want to be the best in the class. If not, I want to be at least in the top three or beat a particular individual.’
• Mastery goals: ‘I’m aiming to demonstrate an improvement in my ability to execute on this particular skill, which I’ve been reflecting on, tracking and practising.’
• Do-best goals: ‘Regardless of the outcome, I want to feel as if I’ve done myself justice and feel a sense of satisfaction.’
• Challenge-seeking goals/personal bests: ‘I know how I tend to perform in these situations and I have data to evidence where I’m up to. I’m aiming to use feedback, reflection and practice to achieve my highest score yet.’

Avoidance goals focus on averting a negative outcome:

• Performance-avoidance goals: ‘I want to perform anonymously so that I don’t stand out as in any way incompetent.’
• Mastery-avoidance goals: ‘I know there’s a specific way I tend to mess this up. I’m focusing on avoiding that error in my execution.’
• Failure-avoidance goals: ‘I know what the pass mark is. I’m going to go into the exam focused on that, and just make sure I get over the line.’

Simply assessing these seven approaches to goal setting might have us thinking of specific students we’ve taught in the past. We might also have experience-based ideas about which goals are likely to positively impact on academic performance and which aren’t. In case you’re wondering, the research is constantly developing as more goal types are added to models. Two academics from the University of Lausanne summarise one aspect helpfully for us: ‘Consistently in achievement goal research, pursuing performance-avoidance goals has been associated with a decrease in achievement’ (Swiatkowski and Dompnier, 2021, p. 1).

And, when it comes to the difference between two achievement goals – performance goals and mastery goals – we consistently see further interesting differences. One 2004 paper found that ‘performance-oriented students tend to embrace surface learning [which is] characterized by more memorization and less effort. In contrast, deep learning, which frequently appears among student[s] who are mastery-oriented, probably lasts longer and raises the quality of students’ learning’ (Alhadabi and Karpinski, 2020, p. 2; see also Duff, 2004). Other studies find that mastery goals increase intrinsic motivation as well as reducing anxiety and improving enjoyment of learning (Greene et al., 2004; Ranellucci et al., 2015).

Hopefully, one thing is clear: simply having a goal isn’t enough. We need to help students set goals that will work for them – encouraging them away from avoidance towards achievement and raising their levels of self-efficacy.

What else does the evidence tell us? Any exploration of goal setting takes us to the work of Professors Edwin Locke and Gary Latham who, from the 1970s and 1980s onwards, have explored goal-setting theory in several much referenced books and papers. Their focus is often on goal difficulty and performance. ‘Hard goals,’ they write, ‘lead to greater effort and persistence than easy goals, assuming the goals are accepted’ (Locke and Latham, 1990, p. 29). Specificity is also something that interests them; they spend time exploring, through meta-analyses, the power of specificity, concluding that 96% of the studies analysed ‘showed significant, or contingently significant effects in favour of specific, hard goals’ (Locke and Latham, 1990, p. 30). In comparison, they report, subjects with do-best goals use less stringent standards to assess themselves and are therefore more likely to experience dips in performance.

The phrase ‘assuming the goals are accepted’ will surely catch the eye of any teacher. Working with students all the time, as we do, we’re likely to have observed that the learner’s psychological enrolment in the process of improvement is crucial to extracting greater levels of commitment.

Professor Andrew Martin’s work at the University of New South Wales is interesting in this respect. He took eighty-nine students from both primary and secondary schools and put them through two maths exams a year apart, the first in August 2012 and the second in 2013. In preparation for the second test, forty-one of the students set themselves challenge-seeking personal best goals before the exam; the other forty-eight had a goal selected for them. Both groups were balanced as far as possible for gender, age and other demographics.

The goal-setting group were given a questionnaire asking them to outline their aims for the approaching test. They were provided with lots of possible goals and had the freedom to commit to whichever goals they wanted. Afterwards and separately, they were asked to set themselves a challenge-based personal-best goal with the following prompt: ‘Last year you scored xx/40 in your mathematics test. Can we encourage you to set a Personal Best (PB) target for this year’s mathematics test that is higher than last year’s test?’ (Martin and Elliot, 2015, p. 7). Once the student had chosen their own challenge goal, they were reminded regularly (by text) of this goal in the days running up to the test.

The second group were given the same questionnaire and had the chance to respond to the same goal options. Afterwards and separately, however, they were given a goal and were not reminded of their goal once it had been set.

Both groups received no teaching specific to the test, and the test they sat was not identical to the previous year’s, but what the researchers call ‘parallel’ – that is, similar in structure and challenge (forty questions, a mix of multiple choice and short answers).

So, what happened? The group who had been given a goal scored 74% on test one,...