Consistency: the key to improving everything

I remember having a conversation something like this with my son, James, when he was ten or eleven years old:

 

Me: Son, you really need to be eating your fruit and vegetables if you want to be healthy and strong

James: But a lot of them don’t taste very nice, Dad

Me: Well, I know that’s how you feel now, but they’re good for you and if you keep eating them you will come to like them and you’ll be a lot healthier. And you’ll feel better!

James    Okay, Dad

 

Two days later…

 

James: Dad, you said if I ate lots of fruit and vegetables I would be healthier and feel better, and I have but I don’t feel any different and most of them still taste horrible. It’s just not working, Dad.

 

I once saw a picture of the plant, sea kale, that someone had posted online and next to it were these words:  Eat this miracle food every day and get a flat tummy in three months – guaranteed!

 

Guaranteed. We can all be forgiven for trying to improve things quickly through what the author and business leadership speaker, Simon Sinek, calls ‘intensity’: going hell-for-leather at something over a very short period of time – zeal, born of desperation, or impatience. We tend to be impatient in our desire to improve, and we are understandably tempted by the lure of miracle solutions and quick fixes.

 

We should be very sceptical about miracle solutions, and quick fixes rarely result in sustained improvement – only sustained improvement leads to long-term positive change. Just as we can’t demonstrate lasting progress in one lesson in school, we can’t demonstrate lasting improvement in a day or a week or two – we have to be doing the right things every day (give or take) for a long time. Or quite a long time. Nothing else really works.

 

For example…

 

Say I want flat, hard abdominal muscles. I’m determined to have them – after all, the guy on the cover of the Men’s Health magazine on the shelf in Tesco I walked past last week has them in spades – and he looks really happy. So I leg it to the gym on Saturday morning, and I spend four hours there. I really go at it and by the time I get home it’s like I’ve been wrestling a bear – I look exactly the same, of course, but I feel terrible.

 

Exercise doesn’t work that way. But if I go to the gym four times a week for six months and I exercise in the right way, there’s a good chance I will be a lot closer to my goal. Why? Because as Sinek says, it’s not about intensity, it’s about consistency.

 

Same with weight loss. If I wake up one day and decide I want to lose a stone of weight, not eating a thing all that day and the next won’t get me there. But changing my habits – eating sensibly (which in my case means cutting out a lot of the sweet things I love to eat) for six months and exercising regularly will probably get me there. Or a lot closer to there. Consistency, not intensity.

 

Consistency is the key in schooling, too. It’s not about what we do once or twice, or once in a while, intensely, in a flurry of energised enthusiasm. It’s about what we do every day. That applies particularly to two of the biggest school improvement variables: behaviour routines, and teaching techniques. It’s simple sensible routines applied with consistency by everyone that improve behaviour (not the once a term Monday morning blitz); and it’s the teaching techniques that are applied consistently – clear learning intentions and success criteria, smart checking for understanding and filling knowledge gaps, no hands up, guided and independent practice, frequent knowledge retrieval etc – that make the difference long term.

 

It’s consistency, not intensity – ‘and that’s what gets results’ as Fun Boy Three said.