Song-and-Dance Consulting – Education Rickshaw
If you’re under 30—or as chronically online as I am—you will know the YouTube influencer, Mr. Beast. Regardless of whether you have an opinion of Mr. Beast, he has some interesting things to say about consultants:
Consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world’s largest slice of cake? Start off by calling the person who made the previous world’s largest slice of cake lol. He’s already done countless tests and can save you weeks worth of work. I really want to drill this point home because I’m a massive believer in consultants. Because I’ve spent almost a decade of my life hyper obsessing over youtube, I can show a brand new creator how to go from 100 subscribers to 10,000 in a month. On their own it would take them years to do it. Consults are a gift from god, please take advantage of them. In every single freakin task assigned to you, always always always ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you. This is so important that I am demanding you repeat this three times in your head “I will always check for consultants when i’m assigned a task”
Call it self-serving if you want—I’m a consultant, after all —but I agree with the essence of this quote. Whether you’re remodeling your garage or improving behavior school-wide, you can either:
1. Figure it out on your own
2. Have someone teach you how to do it
3. Hire someone to do it for you/with you.
When the stakes are high, time is short, and your energy is already stretched thin, trying to do everything yourself isn’t just inefficient—it can be reckless. Yet we seem wired, as the Mr. Beast quote implies, to romanticize that first path. We elevate those who burn the midnight oil, reinventing solutions that others have already figured out. All the while, the clock keeps ticking in education, a field in which complacency is especially damaging for the most disadvantaged children.
This isn’t to say consultants are the answer to all our schools’ problems – they usually aren’t. My main concern with most educational consulting offerings is that they aren’t designed to help schools change, but to make schools feel like they’re changing. We all know the routine: one high-energy PD session in August, 400 teachers in a cafeteria, a charismatic speaker with some good one-liners and a slick slide deck. Everyone claps, takes a selfie, and then—nothing. When students return from break, it’s back to business as usual. Not because teachers don’t care, or the ideas weren’t good, but because the model is broken.
If you’re going to bring someone in, it has to be someone who’s willing to get their hands dirty. Not forever, but long enough to observe what’s happening, provide granular and actionable feedback, and help turn insights from the science of learning (i.e., cognitive load theory, explicit instruction) into improved performance. This often means laying the foundations for an infrastructure that lasts—because if nothing endures after the consultant leaves, what was the point?
Of course, this kind of work is messier and harder to sell than one-off, “Song-and-Dance” PD. It’s also riskier. It requires you to think on your feet, and lots of consultants have been out of classrooms for so long they’re afraid of walking back into one. PowerPoint is more comfortable than Period 6 at a struggling school. You can recycle a keynote; you can’t fake credibility with teachers.
Song-and-dance consulting is what schools have come to expect, and it doesn’t ruffle any feathers. It gets booked. It gets praised. But let’s be honest—it doesn’t move the needle. And it’s wrong to take schools’ money and leave them with little more than a buzzword and a memory. I didn’t get into education to make schools feel good for a day. I got in to help make them better. So I’m choosing the long road: stronger partnerships with fewer schools, more prototyping and implementation work, more classroom visits and feedback loops, and yes, often less money. But the tradeoff of real, lasting change is worth it.
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