Martin Griffin

In The Student Mindset: A 30-item toolkit for anyone learning anything, Steve Oakes and Martin Griffin provide clear, effective and engaging tools designed to help students plan, organise and execute successful learning. Successful students find a way to succeed. They get the results they want. And they achieve this not by superior ability, but by sticking to habits, routines and strategies that deliver those results. By cutting through the noise surrounding academic success and character development, bestselling authors Steve Oakes and Martin Griffin have identified the five key traits and behaviours that all students need in order to achieve their goals: vision, effort, systems, practice and attitude (VESPA). These characteristics beat cognition hands down, and in The Student Mindset Steve and Martin provide a ready-made series of study strategies, approaches and tactics designed to nurture these qualities and transform your motivation, commitment and productivity. The book's thirty activities, while categorised thematically under the VESPA umbrella, have been organised around six key phases of learning so that you can recognise which phase you're in before choosing from the range of tools and techniques to help you get through it. The six co-existing key phases are: preparation; starting study; collecting and shaping; adapting, testing and performing; flow and feedback; and dealing with the dip. At each phase you'll experience challenges and discover new ways of working, and this book's activities have been designed to help you gain control and become a better learner by sharing workload management tactics and revision strategies associated with calm, purposeful study and - ultimately - getting good results. These tools include a range of effective prioritisation, stress reduction, procrastination-busting and mindset development approaches - all neatly packaged into this outstanding practical guide to becoming a successful and confident student. Suitable for all students.

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 GCSE is a result of character, not intelligence. The GCSE Mindset Student Workbook offers students a structured way to work through the 40 activities in Steve Oakes and Martin Griffin's The GCSE Mindset (ISBN 978-178583184-3). It coaches students to develop the key characteristics which will help them be successful at GCSE: vision, effort, systems, practice and attitude (VESPA). Based on the authors' collective 30-plus years of teaching and coaching, this practical workbook will enable students to break through barriers, build resilience, better manage their workload and release their potential. While categorised thematically under the VESPA umbrella, the activities have been sequenced chronologically by month in order to chart the student's journey through the academic year and to help navigate the psychological terrain ahead. Each activity has been designed with a pupil audience in mind, takes 15 to 20 minutes to complete, and allows space for students to record and reflect on their answers and to organise their thinking. Sold in packs of 25, the workbook sets are ideally suited for GCSE teachers and tutors who want their classes to benefit from the GCSE mindset and are using The GCSE Mindset.

The story of arts and cultural policy in the twenty-first century is inherently of global concern no matter how local it seems. At the same time, questions of identity have in many ways become more challenging than before. Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World explores how and why stories and identities sometimes merge and often clash in an arena in which culture and policy may not be able to resolve every difficulty. DeVereaux and Griffin argue that the role of narrative is key to understanding these issues. They offer a wide-ranging history and justification for narrative frameworks as an approach to cultural policy and open up a wider field of discussion about the ways in which cultural politics and cultural identity are being deployed and interpreted in the present, with deep roots in the past. This timely book will be of great interest not just to students of narrative and students of arts and cultural policy, but also to administrators, policy theorists, and cultural management practitioners.

The GCSE Mindset: 40 activities for transforming student commitment, motivation and productivity, written by Steve Oakes and Martin Griffin, offers a wealth of concrete, practical and applicable tools designed to supercharge GCSE students' resilience, positivity, organisation and determination. At a time when GCSE teaching can feel like a conveyor belt of micromanaged lessons and last-ditch interventions, Steve and Martin - acclaimed authors of The A Level Mindset - suggest a different approach, underpinned by their VESPA model of essential life skills: vision, effort, systems, practice and attitude. These five non-cognitive characteristics beat cognition hands down as predictors of academic success, and in The GCSE Mindset Steve and Martin take this simple model as their starting point and present a user-friendly month-by-month programme of activities, resources and strategies that will help students break through barriers, build resilience, better manage their workload and ultimately release their potential - both in the classroom and beyond. The book's forty activities, while categorised thematically under the VESPA umbrella, have been sequenced chronologically by month in order to better chart the student's journey through the academic year and to help them navigate the psychological terrain ahead. Each activity can be delivered one-to-one, to a tutor group or to a whole cohort, has been designed to take fifteen to twenty minutes to complete, and has been written with a pupil audience in mind. However, to complement the tasks' practical utility, the authors also explore the underpinning research and theory - including the pioneering work of Angela Duckworth, Dr Steve Bull and Carol Dweck - in more detail in the introduction to each section. Informed by the authors' collective thirty-plus years of teaching and coaching, this essential handbook for GCSE success also suggests key coaching questions and interventions for use with pupils and includes expert guidance on how schools can implement and audit the core components and outcomes of the VESPA approach in their own settings. Additionally - and indeed pertinently in the present educational environment where empirical data is valued so highly - the book features a chapter dedicated to the measurement of mindset, written by guest contributors Dr Neil Dagnall and Dr Andrew Denovan from Manchester Metropolitan University. They present the twenty-eight-item VESPA questionnaire, which they helped Steve and Martin to design, and take the reader through the research process behind its origins before going on to describe how it can be used to identify areas for development and to measure the impact of interventions. Suitable for teachers, tutors and parents who want to boost 14-16-year-olds' academic outcomes and equip them with powerful tools and techniques in preparation for further education and employment.

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. The A Level Mindset Student Workbook offers students a structured way to work through the 40 activities in The A Level Mindset ISBN 978-178583024-2 by Steve Oakes and Martin Griffin. It coaches students to develop the key characteristics which will help them be successful at A level: vision, effort, systems, practice and attitude. With space for students to record and reflect on their answers, along with plenty of advice for improvement and self-development based on the authors' experience as heads of a successful sixth form, the student workbook is an essential tool to help students with their time management, commitment, motivation and study habits which will ultimately help them achieve. Sold in packs of 25, the workbook sets are ideally suited for A level class teachers, and heads of sixth forms or colleges, who want their classes to benefit from the A level mindset and are using The A Level Mindset ISBN 978-178583024-2

During their combined 40 plus years of teaching and coaching, Steve and Martin have discovered something important: 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 in Year 11 to outstanding results in Year 13, while 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 in order to be successful: vision, effort, systems, practice and attitude.These characteristics beat cognition hands down. Having pinned down the core traits that contribute to student success, the authors have developed a range of practical activities to help every student develop the A Level Mindset: 40 concrete, easy-to-use and applicable tools and strategies that will supercharge learners' ambition, organisation, productivity, persistence and determination.And in this revised edition Steve and Martin present a range of case studies and useful advice on effective implementation to guide schools towards putting the VESPA model into practice. Furthermore, they have also revamped the introductions to each aspect of the VESPA model with updated insights and references.Suitable for teachers, tutors, heads of sixth form or anyone else who wants to help A level students achieve their potential.

The story of arts and cultural policy in the twenty-first century is inherently of global concern no matter how local it seems. At the same time, questions of identity have in many ways become more challenging than before. Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World explores how and why stories and identities sometimes merge and often clash in an arena in which culture and policy may not be able to resolve every difficulty. DeVereaux and Griffin argue that the role of narrative is key to understanding these issues. They offer a wide-ranging history and justification for narrative frameworks as an approach to cultural policy and open up a wider field of discussion about the ways in which cultural politics and cultural identity are being deployed and interpreted in the present, with deep roots in the past. This timely book will be of great interest not just to students of narrative and students of arts and cultural policy, but also to administrators, policy theorists, and cultural management practitioners.

This book discusses how Northern writers came to grips with the mixed legacy of the Civil War.The memory of the American Civil War took many forms over the decades after the conflict ended: personal, social, religious, and political. It was also remembered and commemorated by poets and fiction writers who understood that the war had bequeathed both historical and symbolic meanings to American culture. Although the defeated Confederacy became best known for producing a literature of nostalgia and an ideological defensiveness intended to protect the South's own version of history, authors loyal to the Union also confronted the question of what the memory of the war signified, and how to shape the literary response to that individual and collective experience.In ""Ashes of the Mind"", Martin Griffin examines the work of five Northerners - three poets and two fiction writers - who over a period of four decades tried to understand and articulate the landscape of memory in postwar America, and in particular in that part of the nation that could, with most justification, claim the victory of its beliefs and values. The book begins with an examination of the rhetorical grandeur of James Russell Lowell's ""Harvard Commemoration Ode"", ranges across Herman Melville's ironic war poetry, Henry James' novel of North-South reconciliation, ""The Bostonians"", and Ambrose Bierce's short stories, and ends with the bitter meditation on race and nation presented by Paul Laurence Dunbar's elegy ""Robert Gould Shaw."" Together these texts reveal how a group of representative Northern writers were haunted in different ways by the memory of the conflict and its fraught legacy.Griffin traces a concern with individual and community loss, ambivalence toward victory, and a changing politics of commemoration in the writings of Lowell, Melville, James, Bierce, and Dunbar. What links these very different authors is a Northern memory of the war that became more complex and more compromised as the century went on, often replacing a sense of justification and achievement with a perception of irony and failed promise.

The Vietnam War, from a very different angle, seen through the eyes of a British musician who spent 18 months there, from 1967 to 1969, playing for American troops. Entertaining and informative, satirical and funny, it certainly gives us a different insight into some aspects of this 'rock'n'roll war.'