Many teachers have good intentions to come up with a plan at the beginning of every school year. Unfortunately, these intentions are not always followed through.

The most common way teachers stray from the plan is the action they take responding to bad behavior. Teachers will let a student get away with the same thing for days, weeks, and sometimes even months, but one day when time has passed for too long, they finally decide to say something.

For example, a group of students are a bit chatty in the back of the room and the teacher chooses to ignore it for two weeks, shortly after that time they decide to bring it up in front of the whole class. Why should those students be yelled at now just because the leader of the classroom didn’t follow through on the rules at first? The teacher could have handled the situation calmly when they first noticed something was wrong.

Another inconsistency that teachers face affects students’ lives the most and can even hurt them academically. This of course, is the way a teacher chooses to teach. Teachers explain their syllabus at the beginning of the year, and it sometimes highlights how they will teach the class each unit, but some teachers decide to change their process for every unit.

For instance, in one class, it is common that the teacher will hand out a vocabulary packet for each unit. They usually say this in the syllabus, but then they change their mind mid year and decide to not use vocabulary packets.

This inconsistency can lead to students failing as some students come up with a plan for each class, but without consistency, their plan won’t work because they will have to keep changing it, and that will get in the way of their study habits.

The last, though least significant and most common way teachers aren’t the same in their classroom is their judgement when taking phones away. Though it is school policy that students need to keep their phones away during class, teachers sometimes don’t even follow that. Students often will take their phones out and although they are aware that they are risking getting it taken away, they never know when their teacher will actually take away their phone or just say “please put it away.”

Teachers switch between the two options constantly, but choose the latter more often, leaving students to believe they are free to take their phone out whenever they wish.

There is a simple fix to all of these inconsistencies in the classroom. The fix is to make a firm decision on classroom policies before printing that syllabus at the beginning of the year, and once those ideas are presented to the class, stick with them. The result will be tremendous: not only will students respect their teachers more, they will also have greater success just because the teacher decided to be consistent.