5 Understanding inconsistency and the outcomes of inconsistency

Eric Holtzclaw, a company strategist writing for Inc.com, highlights five important reasons for consistency, each of which can be applied to school life: [12]

1 Consistency allows for measurement.

2 Consistency creates accountability.

3 Consistency establishes your reputation.

4 Consistency makes you relevant.

5 Consistency maintains your message.

Joseph Folkman, a behavioural statistician, studied the performance of 100,000 business leaders rated on five items to compile a ‘Consistency Index’ [13]. Each can be be applied to classroom/school leaders:

‘A consistent person:

Is a role model and sets a good example.

Avoids saying one thing and doing another.   

Honours commitments and keeps promises.

Follows through on commitments.

Willing to go above and beyond what needs to be done.

This is the kind of person that is predictable and reliable. Others would make bets on this person because their performance is consistent.’

Folkman continues with a list of effects that inconsistency causes:

‘Their judgment was not trusted in making decisions.

They were not trusted by their teammates.

They did not follow through on objectives and tended to get distracted.

Often failed to achieve agreed-upon goals.

Resisted taking steps to improve.

They didn't co-operate well with others.

They failed to anticipate problems until it was too late.

In general, these people seemed to be perceived as not caring about outcomes at work and lazy about their job in general.’

A final statement indicates the low tolerances that enable inconsistency to spread:

‘It appeared that a little bit of inconsistency had a profoundly negative effect on almost every other competency and behaviour.’

We can now look at how far-reaching these examples might be in schools.

Inconsistencies in everyday patterns of school rules (Thornberg, 2007) [14] describes the difficulties in establishing behavioural expectations:

‘ … implicit rules, i.e., unarticulated supplements or exceptions, can, at least in part, explain inconsistencies in teachers’ efforts to uphold explicit school rules … rule inconsistency and unarticulated implicit rules appear to create rule diffusion, which, in turn, creates a prediction loss among students. They cannot always predict what will be appropriate behaviour in particular situations, and how teachers will react to their behaviour.’ (p.2 abstract)

The education journalist Laura McInerney describes the impact of this difficulty [15]:

‘Three amazing (and unexpected) things happened from this process: First, the initial question on the sheet asked pupils to write why they were in detention. I reckon about 60% of kids said something different to the reason why I had put them on detention. Sometimes they even admitted things I hadn’t seen. As someone who prided myself on being a clear communicator I found this disheartening, and was always glad of an opportunity to put students right on the reason for a detention as, in the heat of being told off, it does seem that students stop hearing or we stop explaining clearly – maybe a bit of both.’ 

Thornberg confirms variations on these themes with school policies also introducing inconsistency:

‘One of the teachers tells me that, as a consequence of lack of time, she now and then forgets to manage conflicts that she has told the students she would do later. Some teachers also report that they sometimes experience conflicts among values in different situations, are critical of some of the rules in the school, and experience a conflict between subject teaching and morally educating the students. They also talked about temporally personal deficits, e.g., that they sometimes are tired, off balance, or have a ‘bad day’. It is very likely that all these factors can, in part, explain why teachers at times behave inconsistently regarding students’ rule transgressions’ (Thornberg, 2007, p.13)

Citing Duke, D. L. (1978) Adults can be discipline problems too! Psychology in the Schools, (522-528) Thornberg provides two further areas of concern not previously mentioned:

‘ … (c) insensitivity to students, e.g., exhibiting little patience for students’ concerns and the ‘teach the best, forget the rest’ philosophy ... and (f) inadequate administration of disciplinary policies. Several teachers in the study admitted to being inconsistent, and justified their behaviour by saying that there were too many school rules for any individual to enforce effectively. Nearly 70% of them acknowledged that they actually did not know how many rules there were.’ (p.4)

These examples (c and f) in particular introduce the cyclical nature of education: (c) brings into question the validity of the modern day example referred to in [10] (ignoring low level disruption) and (f) similarly with [11] (purposely complex behaviour management systems). Between staff trained in different generations - particularly between those in positions of responsibility and their mentees - a new strain of systemic inconsistency might be created. This recycling of ideas that have been previously discounted indicates a scarcity of new ideas.

However inconsistency is caused it is clear that Folkman’s requirement to ‘honour commitments and keep promises’ - whether between a school and its employees, or teaching staff and their students - struggles to be met.

Though focused at a higher level than schools, the importance of ‘honour[ing] commitments and keep[ing] promises’ is reflected in Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century, Nagin, D.S.(2013) [16] , the contents of which are equally applicable to rule breaking generally:

‘The evidence in support of the deterrent effect of the certainty of punishment is far more consistent than that for the severity of punishment. However, the evidence in support of certainty’s effect pertains almost exclusively to apprehension probability. Consequently, the more precise statement is that certainty of apprehension, not the severity of the ensuing legal consequence, is the more effective deterrent.’

It would appear from the examples seen so far that transgressions are not only going undetected and unpunished in schools, they are also, as a result, not being deterred.

It follows, therefore, that any previously held assertion that students alone are responsible for low level disruption in schools can be dismissed. 

In the following section we look at the effects of this inconsistency on students.

NEXT >

References:

12 https://www.inc.com/eric-v-holtzclaw/consistency-power-success-rules.html

13 Joseph Falkman: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joefolkman/2019/10/17/your-inconsistency-is-more-noticeable-than-you-think/?sh=83135453d507

14 https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:18289/FULLTEXT01.pdf

15 https://lauramcinerney.com/ms-mcinerneys-book-of-consequences-detention-system/

16 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670398