THE

MODEL

How well do you know what

you want to achieve?

How do you respond to setbacks?

How many hours of

independent work do

you do?

How do you organise

your learning and your

time?

What kind of work do

you do to practice your

skills?

Vision

Attitude

Effort Systems Practice

THE

CONCEPT

V• Having a VISION

E• Commitment to the EFFORT needed

S• Having suitable SYSTEMS in place

P• PRACTISING your learning and skills

A• Developing a positive mental ATTITUDE

… are designed to help you to realise your

VISION, understand how

much EFFORT is

involved in achieving them, make sure that

you have SYSTEMS in

place to work effectively,

enable you to PRACTICEeverything you have learnt in lessons and to have the positive

ATTITUDE that is needed

to drive this success.

THE

ACTIVITIES

VISION

It is very difficult to answer the question ‘what is your long term goal in life?’ This is very general and abstract. However, it is a vital element to succeeding in life. To make this more meaningful you need to break it down into short term goals that will keep you on track and give you a sense of achievement.

Do you have dreams that you’ve talked about, but never followed up

with action? Dreams that deep down you would really like to turn into goals? Are your goals push or pull?

The following activities have specific tasks that will support you in identifying and/or clarifying your academic or personal goals

and how to achieve them.

Help with seeing your VISION

Have positive

/inspirational quotes

posted in key

locations that will

catch your eye and

give you a motivation

boost to stay on track

with your homework,

etc.

Put a photo of your chosen

career or a person you admire

and would like to emulate in

your own life where it will be a

frequent reminder of your goals.

Can you think of other ways

you can create visual

reminders and prompts that

would work for you?

Examples might be a “mood

board” or your choice of

music to play at the start of

the day or after a hard day at

school?

Place a picture of the

university you want to attend

on the inside of one of your

folders so you see it every

time you open that folder.

This will remind you of your

goal and give you a focus

every day!

EFFORT“Nothing worth having was ever achieved without effort”.

Theodore Roosevelt

What is your level of commitment to your studies?

How much work are you willing to do?

Recent UK research shows that high achieving A-Level students

commit to and extra 20-30 hours of independent study

every week!

Where can you find this time?

EFFORT

Reminder: What is the trigger that will get you studying? Is this clearing your study

space? Or making a drink/getting a snack, or setting an alarm to remind you to start to study?

Routine: This is the action of doing the studying, settling yourself down, putting your

phone and devices away, turning off the music or TV or any other distraction and just getting on with it! You will waste productive time by putting off studying rather than accepting this is what you need to do in order to succeed. You have a unique opportunity - don’t rob yourself of valuable time.

Reward! You should feel proud of yourself if you have completed a homework

task, consolidated key learning from a lesson, made a useful revision resource, etc. Do not forget to give yourself credit for all your achievements; it’s not vain if you earned it.

THINK

SYSTEMS

Systems refer to how you organise your learning and your time.

In other words, what have you in place to support your learning?

SYSTEMS

Systems are also about your organisational skills: How do you perform now?• Do you complete all homework on time?• When confronted with a problem, do you weigh

the pros and cons of various situations?• If a problem is very large, do you divide it into

small parts?• Do you brainstorm possible solutions to solve

problems?• When confronted with a problem, do you

analyse the situation?• Do you allow yourself the luxury of sorting your

notes regularly?

PRACTICE

PRACTICE

Practice is about what you do once you know the task you are working towards:• Do you know what the exam

questions look like for each of your courses?

• Do you know what skills are being tested?

• And do you know which skills you’re good at, and which you still need to develop?

You can improve your outcomes by using these practice techniques:Writing exam answers under timed conditions and getting these markedUsing mark schemes and examiners reportsComparing model answers against your own workCreating your own exam questionsMaking a revision schedule or planner

Revision techniques come into this element. How you learn/work is the key to good grades.

ATTITUDE

ATTITUDE

Thrive on a challengeDetermined

Willing to take risksEnjoy being assessed

“the desire to be successful outweighs the

fear of failure”

Avoid challengesWork slowly

Avoid taking responsibility“want to be successful, but

the fear of failure outweighs the desire to succeed”

NEED TO ACHIEVE

NEED TO AVOID

FALIURE

Your 21st Birthday

Purpose:

By creating a vision of what you would like to be in the near future, in different areas of your life, you can reflect on where you are and where you want to be.

Write down what you think each family/friend member may say and what you need/want to do between now and then to achieve the desired description.

Scenario:

Imagine its your 21st Birthday. You need to picture an unusual 21st at which your family and friends stand up and describe the type of person you are for them.

Key Questions:

1. What would you like them to say?

2. What qualities do you think they would describe?

3. When they list your achievements what would you like the list to include?

4. What would you like to be included that you still intend to do in the future?

SMART GOALS

Specific: Be as precise as you can rather than general.Measurable: How will you know when you have reached your goal? Write ‘ I will know I have achieved my goal because…’Action-based: What can you do to get the goal started? How? What’s step 1, step2 step 3? And so on.Realistic: Has someone done it before? Could you speak to that person? Is there evidence to suggest that you can do it? What previous personal successes are connected to your goal?Time-bound: When do you want to do this by? Avoid ‘one day I’m going to…’. Be precise.

Pick one goal related to your education. Try and identify how you can make it SMART.

This is a reflective planning activity designed to help you work towards your end goal by achieving sub-goals along the way. You will now develop SMART goals –something concrete and doable which will help you reach your end goal.

Pg.

14

The 1-10 Scale

Phew! Last year was hard! I worked so hard! It was just really hard!!!

What are the problems with asking questions like these?

… now if I tell you what hard work is… complete the task on page 18…

Working Weeks

In The Recipe for Success (2009), hundreds of high earners were interviewed and the author identified 10 characteristics to gain success. She termed these as the “tenth graft”, by which she means putting in the hours.

Discuss

What does a working week look like?

A fifty hour working week

An eighty hour working week

STUDENT WHO WORKS NO FREE PERIODS = 25 hrs/wk

STUDENT WHO WORKS ALL FREE PERIODS = 35 hrs/wk

A 9am – 5pm JOB = 40 hrs/wk

AVERAGE UK WORKER = 43 hrs/wk

HIGH EARNERS (£50K+ tax bracket) = 50 hrs/wk

COMPANY BOSSES = 60-80hrs/wk

Start the day at… Go home at… Take a lunch break from/to…

Start the day at… Go home at… Take a lunch break from/to…

Review your working week – pg19How many hours are you putting in? How do you

compare to your parents, or to the average UK worker?

Plan where you could get some extra hours from.

Working Weeks

The Energy LineMany students feel overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do at same time due to never ending deadlines! As a result some students create lists and then cross off a job when it has been completed. The problem is the list does not tell you what to do first!

Prioritising your jobs in terms of how much effort is required is a good strategy to use. Does it require you to work really hard or can you relax a leave it until a later date?

Pg. 24

Put things on the left hand ‘HIGH’ side if you need to work like mad on them. Put them on the left side if you can leave it for a bit.

EXTREME HIGH MEDIUM LOW IDLE

Studies show that cramming or bingeing or your learning into one large block is not productive. Snacking or reviewing your learning little and often is much more effective.

Snack don’t Binge form time activity

Pg. 25 - Now plan this weeks worth of private study sessions and get your jobs organised.

3. Now spend the allotted time reviewing what you have covered in each course. Some strategies that nay help you with this are;i. Check and read through your class notesii. Summarise your learning into mind mapsiii. Highlight material you have found hard this

week – this will be the areas you work on in your study periods

iv. Go through your up and coming deadlines (homework, coursework) and make a prioritisedlist of what you need to complete, when you will do it and in which order.

4. Once you have completed this for each of your courses you should feel more organised, in control of what you need to do and have your private study periods planned out for the week.

Purpose:Students that make this weekly review a habit are generally calmer, less stressed and leave school on a Friday knowing they are top of things, meaning any free time over the weekend can be spent on more enjoyable activities, rather than keeping them up all night!

Try to develop the following habits to help your productivity

1. Set aside an hour a week where you must not be disturbed (put your phone on flight mode). A good time maybeMonday period 1 or 2 or Friday period 5 or 6.2. Split the hour up in 4 x 15 minutes segments if you are studying 4 courses or 3 x 20 minute segments if you are studying 3 courses.

The Eisenhower Matrix

The pressure is on. Do you have lots of deadlines to meet?The Eisenhower Matrix is a tool to support you when trying to meet deadlines.

Pg 27-28

List 10 tasks you need to complete. Now place them into the matrix under one of the headings.

Prioritise those which are urgent and important first.

The Revision QuestionnaireResearch shows that a variety of revision methods are more effective than just one or two. If you revised 15 hours per week from one of the categories you are less likely to perform as well as someone who revised for only 10 hours per week but had used methods from all of the different categories.

Pg. 30How many of each different method do you use?Could you use a wider range in any of your ‘energy line’ list to make your revision more effective?

Cat

ego

rie

s

Know the Skills

It is almost impossible to practice and improve in a subject if you do not know the skills that are required. Sports psychologists often work with athletes using a performance profile wheel where each of the skills required are associated with a segment of the wheel and then in discussion are graded. The better/more confident the athlete feels then more of the segment is coloured in.

Pg. 31-32Create your own skill/performance profile like this one but give each segment a tile that relates to a skill in that subject. For example it maybe the assessment objectives from the course specification. It may be some key terms that arise in discussion with your teacher.. Yours may include; Research skills, describing key terms, Analysing data, Concluding investigations, Apply skills practically.

Leitner Box

This is an effective, easy to use practice and recall system. It is based on using flashcards to recall information. The theory behind the Leitner box is to AVOID gravitating towards the content you already know!

1. Create your own flashcards. They should be used to record quick, easy to read bullet pointed information about topics.

2. Use 4 boxes to place your cards based on the information below

Pg. 33

Stopping Negative Thoughts

Now reframe the following statements using a more positive mind-set

a) I’ve never been good at exams

b) Stuff like this always happens to me

c) If my report is bad my mum and dad are going to kill me

d) I’m only going to fail so what is the point in trying

e) The teacher doesn’t like me

f) I’ve been rubbish at this subject since primary school, I should never have picked it for A-level

g) If I fail this mock the while term will be a disaster

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by what you are trying to achieve? It is not uncommon to feel this way sometimes, but allow the negative thoughts to take hold and they will damage your chances of success.

Kill your Critic

Your critic is the internal voice that likes to poke fun at your dreams and achievements. Sadly we all have one – but they can be put in their place!

Try the following to improve your confidence:

Failing Forwards

Dan Coyle (author of the Talent Code) argues mistakes are pieces of information. You become brilliant at something because you made lots of mistakes to begin with. Some people try to avoid failure and some see it as an opportunity to improve. Your job is to see failure as part of a process to get better at something.

Pg. 40-41(Now try and reflect on a recent failure and use the terms from the right hand column)• Describe the failure in a

paragraph• Look at the teachers feedback –

what are the areas of weakness? (rephrase these using the right hand column)

• Now make a simple list of what you would do next time.

ChunkingChunking allows people to take smaller bits of information and combine them into more meaningful, and therefore more memorable, wholes.

Read effectively!

Turn off your phone! Don’t get distracted!

Condense the page that you have been reading

into 9 bullet points

Delete all unnecessary words that will fill up

your memory

Chunking 2

Split your bullet points into chunks of 3

Read the first 3 bullet points continuously for 2 minutes and write down what you can remember

Repeat for all chunks of 3 and then finally repeat for all 9 bullet points at once

Cornell Note Taking

Re-writing notes is a good way to refresh your memory and absorb information… but it can take a long time and be quite BORING! Is there a method you can use which will mean you have to THINK as well?

Fold a piece of paper into 3 pieces as shown below

QuestionsNotes

Summary

Now you have less space for notes so be brief!

Cornell Note Taking

Now try this with some notes from a recent class

You can use this during a class when you are expected to take notes too!