This week’s chapter has my brain
spinning round and round. I honestly
found it difficult to read, and often found myself reading paragraphs over
again several times in order to comprehend what was being said. (I’m going to blame my niece and nephew for
being cute little distractions while their Mom was at work this week! Here's hoping I got the concepts right!)
Once I got through the concepts
behind HPI, I found myself comparing it mostly to the teacher evaluation system
we have established here in Michigan and my district. Teachers are often evaluated by a few
classroom tours and visits. This is a
snapshot into our daily instruction, interaction with parents and teachers, and
our everyday happenings. However these
30minutes “visits” are enough to judge a year’s worth of educational happenings
in the eyes of the public. The vision of
HPI is stated as being: “to achieve, through people, increasingly successful
accomplishments, directly tied to organizational goals, that are valued by all
stakeholders, including those who
perform, their managers, their peers, the organization as a whole,
shareholders, customers, regulatory agencies and even society itself.” It is within this vision statement that I
feel we lose HPI in our environments.
How can it be a vision that shows improvement in our schools when we are
constantly at “war” with the public and “society” for what is equitable in our
schools and classrooms?
The other key point that caught my
attention was Gilbert’s 4 principals and theorems laid out on page 137 of
Chapter 14. Each of these 4 key points
describes exactly how performance should focused. One of my favorite of the 4 points was the
comment “A system that rewards people for their behavior without accounting for
accomplishment encourages incompetence.”
As an educator, or in any profession for that matter, why would I want
to work just as hard on a difficult task, when a coworker can work on an easy
task and receive the same praise and reward?
I often feel that this is where our evaluation systems fall apart.
I feel that HPI is a
great concept, and that with equitable input as HPI suggests, evaluations and
systems set in place by the group as a collaborative would be a better success
than when forced upon us unwillingly.
Hi Erica,
ReplyDeleteI agree whole heartedly that HPI could/would work much better if it were a collaborative effort rather than the cold and calculated set of questionnaires, trainings, schemes and assessments meant to please shareholders, wether they be corporate CEOs or Board of Trustees tied to CEOs and other politicos, who may or may not be concerned with education beyond profits. From my perspective, educator assessments are more or less a ruse meant to reaffirm the devastating effects of undercutting and defunding education on state and national levels. This way, corporate interests can argue that education isn't working and needs to be privatized, e.g. charter schools, so that the value of education as an institution of creating a well informed democratic citizenry can be transitioned into technical based centers of education for the creation of workers who do not question authority or make waves. I have seen this happen more and more each year I have been in higher education, as less and less value is placed on liberal arts curriculum, but more emphasis is placed on athletics programs and departments in the university that vie for research grants in order to fulfill the role of R&D for the government and corporations, who then own the research, while kicking back very little to broader educational concerns across campus. Anyway, great post, thanks for the insight, have a great week.
Erica,
ReplyDeleteI also compared HPI to teacher evaluations. It is very difficult to gauge the worth of a teacher through a few short visits and evaluate their entire performance from those short glimpses, but that just seems to be the way things are going to be for the time being.
I am reposting here because I am pretty sure I am supposed to. I love the podcasts you chose. The techlandia sounds like it is fun and the edreach sounds very googlecentric, but you have to admit google knows what they are doing now. Especially since many schools are moving to chomebooks. That makes integration easier because as far as I know at this point, you can only use google apps in google chrome. I will check them both out. Thank you.
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