John Constantine makes an excellent point:
>What is "sub-par"? What is "par"? If you were to take any group of people,
>on the average half would be "above par", half would be below
My comments, which were directed against those who place evaluative labels
on people rather than on their actions, should not be construed as
supporting any performance evaluation system built "on the curve." I
agree with you, John.
However, there are other ways of evaluating performance that work and are
even helpful to the person evaluated. In fact, I would say that the
"engine" that drives business to be successful (and is woefully missing in
education and most government-related endeavors) is evaluation -- we have
a "bottom line" and are held accountable for it. Try to get a teacher to
accept any kind of accountability; the moaning and tearing of hair are
wonderful to behold -- and it's happening all over the place in my home
state, Minnesota, right now as teachers are forcing the state legislature
to gut an education standards effort that has been years in the making.
One positive way of evaluating performance, one that I use on myself, is a
form of "goal attainment scaling." It permits people's performance to be
(quite fairly) evaluated and even compared with other people doing very
different things. Simply put, goal attainment scaling allows anyone to
set goals and evaluates their performance on a scale of what percentage of
the goal has been achieved by the deadline (set in the goal statement.)
To make my performance comparable to someone else's, or even to my own in
other time periods, we must have some way of grading the "difficulty" of
the goal, etc., so it's not quite as simple as I painted it. But it is
quite straightforward, participative, fair, etc., but provides the
motivation of holding oneself accountable for results.
--"John Gunkler" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>