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.
