Section 4: Human Performance Technology

Item: Chapter 14 – The Development and Evolution of Human Performance Involvement

In my position I work with teachers in many ways, including assisting them to meet department goals. A performance problem I’ve identified  among our teachers concerns motivation; it’s either low or lacking, and the problem is growing. Once again this school year has been especially difficult on our teachers who, teaching another year of a blend of a blocked and traditional schedule for a total of seven sections, have one 90-minute conference period every other day. And since our department partially is federally funded, our department’s director expects high numbers of students in each of our teachers’ course sections. Nearing the end of the first semester, and already some teachers are resisting in working to meet our goals which consist of industry certifications, dual enrollment, student organizations and internships which are discussed at length during inservice in August. These teachers tell me they don’t have the time nor the energy to plan lessons, activities, nor to create a timeline to assist them in meeting even one of the goals. Our teachers’ meeting our department goals is crucial to the objectives of our department and district goals set forth by our superintendent.

In Reiser & Demsey (2007) Stolovitch states “…possible interventions to improve human performance include new incentive systems, improved and more timely methods for providing feedback to employees, better worker selection procedures….” (p. 141). Among the items listed in the Intervention Selection and Design of the HPT model of ISPI, possible interventions applicable in this situation include career development, coaching, compensation, job aids, job/work design, and team building (Reiser & Demsey, 2007, p. 141). I feel a new incentive system (more specifically, compensation) would help motivate our teachers and will them to improve their performance. In fact, one of our high-performing teachers mentioned to me that if they could receive a monetary stipend from the district for instructing dual enrollment courses it would make their extra effort to become dual enrollment approved worth it. Some of our teachers have had to enroll in evening or online courses with the local 2-year college in order to become eligible to teach dual enrollment. Also, having been in their shoes, I am very familiar with the daily stress of classroom teaching and there not being enough time in the day to accomplish things. Not having a planning period places a higher burden on our teachers to accomplish their lesson planning on their own time, taking away from family time. Our department could assist our teachers, perhaps, by offering to compensate them if they work after school or on Saturdays to plan. However, I feel a more viable and effective way of motivating our teachers to assist them in meeting the department’s and district’s expectations and goals is that our district restructure the master schedule so that our teachers are afforded a 90-minute period every day for planning and conference. I know this period, which would be used for the purpose of planning, could help our teachers to get together with other teachers in their program area and plan on ways to achieve department goals. Together teachers could arrive at solutions on how best to work with students so that students can pass industry certification examinations, on how best to tackle issues of dual enrollment eligibility (because questions arise as to what courses can they teach, how do they become eligible, who do they contact), on how best to form student organizations and where and with whom do they begin conversations regarding internships. These four items comprise our department's goals which our teachers are expected to meet during the school year. I feel that by working together our teachers can form bonds, break barriers and overcome the challenges imposed on them.

Additionally, I feel coaching, redesign of their work process, and team building could help motivate our teachers and at the same time assist them in meeting our department goals. Teachers could be coached on ways to integrate lessons into their curriculum and on redesigning their work processes so as to allow for better utilization of time for industry certification practices and drills. Working to build teams, that is by program areas, where our teachers can work together to align their curriculum, to share their lessons and plan their school year, certainly would help to ease the stress of having to build one’s own curriculum, thus, hopefully, improve their performance and motivational level.

 

Source:

Reiser, R.A., & Dempsey, J.V. (1992). Trends and issues in instructional design and technology. In H.D. Stolovitch (Ed.), The Development and Evolution of Human Performance Improvement (pp. 134-146). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.

Item: Chapter 15 – Electronic Performance Support Systems: Visions and Viewpoints

O’Leonard (2005) describes performance support systems (PSS) as providing instant access to information, delivered at the time of need. Key characteristics  of PSS  are that they provide access to specific, relevant information needed to perform a task; used on the job, while engaged in the activity; and, can be accessed by the user when the need arises.  Purpose of PSS is to provide information in order to complete a task.

A PSS would not help solve our human performance problems described in Item: Chapter 14. I feel our departmental problems are more personal  related than systematic related. Motivation is a key factor in the problems our departmental teachers are experiencing, and I do not feel that this can be remedied with a type of system that takes the user from “if you are experiencing this type of problem, then click here or there.” I feel PSS provide a quick, systematic “fix” to completing tasks. PSS do not appear to arrive at solutions dealing with motivational issues.

Source:

O’Leonard, K. (2005). Performance Support Systems: How to improve user productivity and lower the costs of software application training. Retrieved from http://www.bersinassociates.com/free_research/epss_paper_2.9.pdf

Item: Chapter 16 – Knowledge Management and Learning: Perfect Together

Motivation is a huge beast to conquer, but not impossible. Professionally written motivational pieces could be collected via our district’s public relations department who can then upload and/or link them to our department’s web page for our teachers’ easy retrieval and/or our dissemination to our teachers on a regular basis. Our district’s area and campus administrators, including our department’s director, could also provide some of the motivational writings as could each of our department’s program areas’ professional associations. Not all our departmental teachers are lacking in motivation, therefore these teachers not being affected could provide a great source of information on how and what they are doing  to meet our goals. This information could be collected and also linked to our department's web page for easy retrieval by all teachers. I think placing all this knowledge information in our department’s web page would help us to organize the information, maintain it, update it, and make it available to all our teachers  who could retrieve it on an as needed and voluntary basis.

Item: Chapter 17 – Informal Learning

In my position I am afforded learning experiences outside of the workplace. Occasionally I attend meetings or conferences where I network with individuals who share the same interests, concerns, even problems. I cherish these networking moments because I learn how others in the same profession who are not in our district handle similar situations. Our department’s staff meets weekly where we share and discuss what we have learned outside of the office and campuses and teachers we service. It is interesting to hear what each of us learns and how we can apply it in our situations and teachers. I keep a library of every textbook, brochure, pamphlet or material that I pickup or am given anywhere I go, which is not difficult to manage, but I feel the informal learning that I come across and share is difficult to codify. I am not taking notes of my informal learning. At our weekly staff meetings no one is taking notes either, we are simply internalizing the information and mentally visualizing and discussing how it applies to our situations and teachers . Later, I may even meet with my teachers one-on-one and discuss ways to help them based on earlier discussions with staff in the office on informal learning, but I am not codifying it in a way that I can make it available to all teachers. I think it would help our departmental teachers, though, if I, and they, shared informal learnings. Since their time during the work week is limited, perhaps we could communicate via a blog which they can access anytime.

And going back to the performance problem from Item: Chapter 14, perhaps by sharing informal learnings with one another teachers could improve their performance and also help with their motivational issue.

 

Informal learning: an everyday solution.

Section 3: Evaluating, Implementing and Managing Instructional Programs and Projects

Item 1 Reflection:

Instructional designs (ID) are evaluated for their design, development and delivery. Two forms of evaluation are formative (occurring during the development stages of the instructional materials) and summative (occurring after the implementation or delivery of the instructional materials).  Whereas the CIPP (Context, Inputs, Process and Product) and Kirkpatrick models are popular approaches of formative and summative evaluation, there are several variations of formative evaluations, such as the Flagg and Tessmer.

Dr. Barbara Flagg stresses upon the need to utilize formative evaluation to inform on the decision-making process during every stage of an ID with the purpose of improving each stage, which are planning, designing, producing and implementing.  There are four phases in Dr. Flagg’s formative evaluation process, and below is a summarization of same.

Stage	Formative Evaluation	Description
Plan	Planning	Data, consisting of existing studies, tests and curricula, expert’s reviews and characteristics of the targeted audience, are analyzed regarding the reason for the program, the content and feasibility of the delivery.
Design	Pre-Production	The targeted audience is used in the making design decisions about content, objectives and production formats. This phase is guided by the preliminary scripts of the planning stage.
Production	Production	Feedback from pilot studies of early programs are considered and revisions are made accordingly.
Implementation	Implementation	Analyze how well the ID works with the targeted audience through field tests. Feedback from field tests assists with development of support materials.

Dr. Martin Tessmer considers three importance reasons for utilizing formative evaluation in instruction:  improving the learning effectiveness of materials, obtaining criticism and suggestions on interest or motivation of instruction to its users, using it because it is already part of the real world of ID. Dr. Tessmer identifies four stages of formative evaluation, each carried out to accomplish different things, yet progressively to improve the instruction. The four stages in order are Expert Review, One-to-One, Small Group and Field Test. Below is a summarization of Dr. Tessmer’s formative evaluation process.

Stage	Description
Expert Review	Experts (such as content, technical, designers, instructors) review the instruction with or without the evaluator present. A decision is made as to what information is needed and from whom. Questions are prepared identifying concerns or improvement areas. The recording tool is designed.
One-to-One	One at a time the learners review the instructional materials with the evaluator present. Topics discussed range from content and direction clarity, to level of difficultness, to motivational appeal.
Small Group	The evaluator uses students as the primary subjects in small groups, focusing on performance data to confirm previous revisions and generate new ones.
Field Test	The instruction/material, polished yet amenable to revisions, is evaluated in the same learning environment in which it will be used when finished.

The concept of formative evaluation is basically the same for Flagg and Tessmer; they both describe it as a process of collecting data used to judge the strengths and weaknesses of an ID in order to revise and improve it. Moreover, I feel both Flagg’s and Tessmer’s processes of formative evaluation are similar, only the staging names are different.

My classroom instruction was evaluated annually as per PDAS requirements. Luckily each year I exceeded preset standards. But these forms of evaluation involved only one person, with one frame of mind, as opposed to formative instructional design evaluation, which involves many people with different perspectives.  This brings to mind my previous association with a small learning community (SLC) at the high school I taught.  We met weekly with our SLC and discussed many things, one being instruction.  Each of us took turns instructing a lesson from our curriculum, and both the manner of instruction and the lesson were critiqued.  Of course, we did not follow either of these approaches of evaluation, but had we followed either of them, I feel our evaluation of each other’s instruction and lesson would have been more formal and in line with research practices.

Source:

Formative Evaluation:  What, why, when, and how. Retrieved November 14, 2012, from http://www.oocities.org/zulkardi/books.html.

Item 2 Reflection:

I would be interested in knowing what the community has to say about instructional design.  Do they agree or approve of the processes involved and do the processing steps validate the type of employee they need, which is the student in the future. In career prep classes, for example, it would be useful to know if the end result looked at in an evaluation is what an employer needs from a student who will be entering the workforce. In my field of employment it would be beneficial to include the business community as part of the evaluators of our teachers’ instructional designs.

Item 3 Reflection:

An example of using situational leadership to facilitate professional development sessions focusing on technology usage in the classroom during economic decline follows below. It just so happens that this situation actually occurred in our district recently.

Two weeks ago we held a half-day inservice for our teachers in our department. About half of the teachers were assigned to me for a technology session. After brainstorming the possibilities previously, I discussed with my director about facilitating specific training sessions within the inservice to benefit teachers in three program areas. I explained that since most of our teachers utilize online curriculum to supplement their lessons, I thought I would focus on how best to utilize the software to increase their students’ chances of passing their program’s industry certification examinations. My director approved my inservice plans, and I proceeded to plan.  I divided our teachers into three broad program areas and tentatively assigned our top three industry certification-producing teachers to lead their program area’s inservice. These teachers are leaders in their field, self-motivated and resourceful, well-liked and respected by everyone, and already these teachers are a resource to teachers in their content areas.  Luckily, when I spoke with them about my plans for inservice each teacher agreed to lead their program area’s inservice. Together we decided upon their training agenda and materials to disseminate during inservice. During the inservice training each leading teacher offered shortcuts and surer methods of utilizing the online curriculum to best help students succeed and pass their program area’s industry certification examinations. Because of the trust that I feel our departmental teachers have upon these leading teachers, I feel our teachers will take what they learned and help their students succeed. I served as delegator of this project and will serve as a monitor for the rest of the school year, monitoring the effects of this training.