Hello ISPI Members,

Have you checked out Performance Xpress this month????  Our patriarch, Hilton Goldman, is being featured as this month's ISPI Member Spotlight.

It is a great article and is a great read.

Don't forget, Thursday, August 28th, is our next meeting!!!  It is at Golden Corral at 6:00pm.

This month we do not have a speaker so it will be one of our roundtable discussions.  The topic will be: Your "Last Lecture".

So here is the scenario: You are retiring, it is you last day at work and in the grand tradition of Randy Pausch you have been given the opportunity to give a "last lecture".  What would you say?  Now to put a better boundary on the subject and to contain the conversation, bring 3 pieces of your BEST ADVICE to give to the person that will be taking your place.

For instance: My first piece of advice would be: "Customers are Counter-Punchers" -  they never know what they want until you show them something and then they will tell you what they don't like.  So show them something quickly so that they will start forming a picture in their head and start to understand what they want.

What will be your advice????

Plus we had talked about Pausch's last lecture during the last meeting.  Jack Jensen at Amer Technology has taken the video and created an interactive quick-reference version online at  http://www.AmerSolutions.com/lastlecture it is a nice way to enjoy it and review your favorite parts.

Here is ADVANCE NOTICE for next month.  We are moving the date of our September meeting one day ahead to Wednesday, September 24th.  Due to a new teaching conflict Dr. Sharon Nichols we had to move the meeting.  Dr. Nichols has written a book call Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools.  Here is the LINK on Amazon and a description...

For more than a decade, the debate over high-stakes testing has dominated the field of education. This passionate and provocative book provides a fresh perspective on the issue. Drawing on their extensive research, Nichols and Berliner document and categorize the ways that high-stakes testing threatens the purposes and ideals of the American education system. Their analysis is grounded in the application of Campbell s Law, which posits that the greater the social consequences associated with a quantitative indicator (such as test scores), the more likely it is that the indicator itself will become corrupted and the more likely it is that the use of the indicator will corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor. Nichols and Berliner illustrate both aspects of this corruption, showing how the pressures of high-stakes testing erode the validity of test scores and distort the integrity of the education system. Their analysis provides a coherent and comprehensive intellectual framework for the wide-ranging arguments against high-stakes testing, while putting a compelling human face on the data marshalled in support of those arguments. 

This will be a bit of a departure from our normal fare but this is a subject that touches all of us.  After the presentation we will talk about No Child Left Behind as a "system".  Then we will apply the Principles of Human Performance Technology and the HTP Model and maybe we will gain a better insight into the problems facing our schools.  It should be very interesting a fun.