HPT & EPSS

Description of HPT:

- What is meant by human performance? The book defines the term HPT with 3 parts: Vision, concept, and Desired End.
Vision – What goals are not being met? Why aren’t these goals being met? What are some possible barriers? Concept – How are goals going to be met? What interventions will be suggested? Desired End- Were the goals met after the intervention was implemented?

- Where is it most applied? HPT has most often been applied in a military or business setting. Lately, there have been attempts to improve education with this form of evaluation and intervention.

- What are the key strengths and limitations? Some of the key strengths are that HPT can provide a very individualized analysis of a problem. When a problem is identified, HPT can provide support through the intervention. Overall, HPT has been shown to improve the effectiveness of workers and therefore improve the effectiveness of an organization as a whole. Some of the limitations are that they can be very labor intensive to create because the analysis is so individualized.

Applications of HPT & EPSS in Education:
- Describe and discuss examples in education setting: The article Systemic Efforts in Georgia to Improve Education Leadership, written by Deb Page, provides a good example of HPT and its potential for use in education. This school system used a systematic approach to identify the needs of school systems, define what was needed from the leadership, find solutions to meet the needs, and finally to evaluate the impact of these solutions after implementation. This article shows that HPT can have value when evaluating schools and school systems.

- Can HPT & EPSS be applied widely nationally to improve school effectiveness? Possibly – I think HPT and EPSS may be more beneficial to school systems, but may not be the best intervention for specific students or teachers. HPT can help a school or school district identify possible problems and underlying factors. EPSS systems are very labor intensive to create and therefore can incur a large cost to the institution.

- What are some possible opportunities & challenges? EPSS could be beneficial to teachers to help provide technical support in schools that may not have on site support. EPSS systems that can help walk teachers through creating an online gradebook or logging into a school network email account would save the time of an on-site tech support person as well as enable the teacher to work through a problem without waiting for a tech support person to show up to help.

Challenges could be the sheer amount of time and money to keep up with EPSS systems that will need to change as needs evolve. If programs/software are not renewed each year the EPSS system will need to be updated to reflect those changes. Again, this costs time and money!

- If you are a technology leader at a school or school district, how would you apply it to improve your organization’s effectiveness? Again, I think EPSS systems could definitely help teachers and students “help themselves” so to speak. HPT may be best if left to help evaluate the overall effectiveness of the district or school. This systematic process can help a school self-diagnose issues, provide possible strategies/solutions, support the implementation of those solutions, and then finally assess the amount of change as a result of the implementation of those suggested strategies.

note: I am an idiot who apparently doesn't know the difference between "publish Post and "save now"....I apologize for just finding my error now, but here is my post! (this week is coming soon!)