Consistency counts! If you have ever taken a piece of delicious cake and found its flavor delightful, then you know the disgust which soon overpowers that taste when further bites reveal that the middle of the cake was undercooked. At that moment, you are well aware of how much consistency counts!
While this illustration is probably familiar to us all, the lack of consistency within the educational classroom may not be so obvious. I have seen inconsistency over the years as many fads and movements have plagued the field of education. Sometimes these happenings were the result of political micromanagement, while at other times they were the result of excellent marketing! At any rate, the results were the same: inconsistency in educational results. It has been easy to sell educators “fads and programs” because the profession does not carry the status of medicine or law for example. I’ve always said, “It will never be possible to see education as a profession as long as we can’t carry our daily work home in a briefcase!”
It is the teachers in the classrooms who have the burden of being consistent. Funding battles and political favors will always abound in the world outside of the classroom. But it is the daily consistency of a good teacher educating his/her students to reach noteworthy, researched, and established goals that make the leaders of tomorrow! I believe it truly takes a “calling” for such teachers to perform consistently when confronted daily by so many viewpoints and interests which conflict with each other. It seems that the public often gets angry with rules and laws created by the government and which are enforced through the schools. Yes, the government sees schools as the agent for change in the social shifts it wants to see take place. What a responsibility and a liability this places upon teachers.
Even though I was called upon for quite a few years to make presentations to educators about applying brain research to educational practices, I was careful to point out that I was really trying to be consistent with the educational practices which made the United States number one in the developed countries of the world. We have fallen from that prestigious position down to 38th in math and 24th in science.
As an accredited school with North Central under the Advanced Ed and now Cognia organizations, we are proponents of “continuous school improvement” and “continuous learning.” Our teachers are expected to teach to the outcomes and benchmarks set as the curriculum of our school. As long as we keep these outcomes before us and make them our goals for lessons taught, we need not be swayed by “fads” and “slick marketing.” I have one excellent example to offer here to drive the point home. Our secondary students who take the ACT have consistently scored 100% ready for college in English. That is due to the consistency Mrs. Smith has used in teaching her students over the years. No, we do not teach students “how to take the tests” as some schools do. Instead, she has developed consistent skills to be taught that make the students educated pupils who are ready for college without any remediation! That’s consistency! Kay