Clarity, Consistency and Congruency in the Teaching Career

This is from MAPP (Motivational Assessment of Personal Potential):
  "Our friend and career consultant, Bill Paxton, likes to say that there are three keys to creating unstoppable momentum in your life:
- Clarity
- Congruency
- Consistency
     Clarity means discovering what you are designed to do. MAPP can help you do that by identifying your greatest motivations and talents. It also provides a list of careers that you are likely to find satisfying.
     One of the greatest benefits of Clarity is having realistic expectations  for yourself. For example, a Jeep and an Indy racer are both cars, but designed to do very different things. You wouldn't expect a Jeep to be competitive in the Indianapolis 500. Nor would you expect the Indy racer to negotiate a logging trail. They are designed for different purposes. So too it is with people. Clarity allows you to have realistic expectations of what you can and can not do.
     It's one thing to know what you are designed to do. It's another to do it. The main idea of Congruency is to align what you do with your MAPP. When it comes to congruency, most of us are rather badly out of alignment. You may need to make some adjustments. Most will be incremental, but some may be radical, such as changing professions. The goal is to spend more time using your strengths. That's where performance and satisfaction both peak.
     Consistency means staying with it. Have you ever been caught in traffic in a large city? You accelerate as the light turns green, only to stop at the red light on the next corner. This pattern of starting and stopping repeats itself over and over as you make your way to your destination. It's impossible to gain any momentum.
     Careers can have momentum, too. Career momentum is achieved by practicing Clarity and Congruency over a long period of time. How long?" One researcher "discovered that it takes between ten and eighteen years to achieve world-class performance in any career. You'll never get there if you keep switching careers.
     The secret to gaining momentum in your life is to do what you are designed to do over a long period of time."

     Eighteen years to achieve world class perfomance in any career? It is instructive to read Daniel Pink on job satisfaction. http://www.danpink.com/
     The conventional wisdom is that it takes four years to be a good teacher. Based on my experience as a teacher and in supervising teachers, I agree with that four year figure. But by eighteen years most teachers become much less willing to change their practices. Teachers need exposure to a variety of school settings and opportunities to learn from master teachers. But what is mastery in teaching?
    The teaching career is inherently autonomous (one of Daniel Pink's keys to job satisfaction).  The question of mastery is a little different. Mastery in teaching is increasingly defined by student perfomance on standardized tests. In fact, the new administration in Washington would like to pay teachers based on this definition of mastery.
    How does a teacher acquire the feeling that he or she is getting better at their job?  Let's expore this concept next time.