HPI or Human Performance Improvement is a term that I have never heard of until reading chapter 14 of the Trends and Issues book. However after looking into what it means and some ideas they gave about it, I would say that it sounds like what most k-12 schools want to accomplish.
On page 135 in the book it says " conceptually, HPI is a movement with a straight forward mission-valued accomplishment through people. Via systematic means, from analysis of performance gaps, design and development of appropriate, economical, feasible, and organizationally acceptable interventions." this really sounds like how most classrooms are run in 2010. First a teacher is looking for what needs to be taught by doing pretests, which could be searching for performance gaps. Once those are found you want to design and develop ways to solve these problems, this is just like in the HPI where it says you will need to look for appropriate interventions. This happens in the classroom all the time, if a student isn't getting something the teacher needs to step back and say how can I do this differently so the kids understand?
I could also see where this would apply to someone in the field of educational technology. If you took someone who was maybe a network administrator at a school, this person would want to build the best and strongest network possible. They would look for gaps in the performance of the network, they would then try to find a ways to fix it. The previous quote uses words like feasible and economical which are both great words to describe what someone in this position would look for when they are trying to fill in performance gaps in their network.
HPI is very similar to what we do as teachers. Its nice to see it in an organized way. Great analogy with the network. Makes it clear to understand.
ReplyDeleteI also enjoyed this chapter and the organizational structure it brought to what should be happening in our schools and classrooms.
ReplyDeleteI also found that the goals of HPI and the school system are the same. The chapter helped to go into detail more about how to reach that goal. I liked how with HPI, you look at more variables than instruction to find out what actually effects [students'] performance. Usually if students perform poorly, it is thought to be reflective of the instruction. That may be the case in some cases, but not in all, which HPI helps us to focus more on--to get to the bottom of the performance issues.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agreee with you more--I think the school systems and HPI have the same goals. I like how they help us to look at the big picture and help us to focus on the student's performance issues and find a way to improve our approach and close the gaps.
ReplyDeleteMargie