Benjamin Steiner

How I got here

I started as a Peace Corps volunteer in Indonesia — two terms, first in East Java, then in the inaugural group of volunteers opening programming in West Timor.

West Timor is where the actual education happened. I watched well-intentioned curricula fail, repeatedly, for one reason: education doesn't work when it isn't tailored to the needs of the people in the room. Not their reading level, not their culture in the abstract — their actual needs. What they already knew. What they were going to have to do on Monday. Material designed somewhere else for someone else arrives technically correct and completely inert.

Everything since has been a variation on that problem. Human rights curricula for Rakhine and Rohingya youth in Sittwe, taught across an active conflict divide. Software adoption training at Catholic Relief Services that had to survive ten languages and twenty-three countries. A million dollars of peacebuilding programming in Cairo and Upper Egypt, which taught me what it costs to actually deliver the plans designers write.

Somewhere in the middle of that I spent a year teaching high school at the Instituto Anglo Britanico in Monterrey, alongside the remote design work. That was deliberate. It is very easy, after a few years of building curricula for other people to deliver, to lose the feel for what a room actually does with your material. Teenagers are the least forgiving audience there is, and they will not pretend a badly sequenced lesson is working.

Then policing — first at the Portland Police Bureau, then across the Caribbean with the Pan American Development Foundation.

What I actually believe

Most training problems aren't training problems. A significant share of what agencies bring to me is a motivation problem, a process problem, or an equipment problem wearing a training costume. The most valuable thing I can do in a first conversation is sometimes tell you not to buy a course. That's the first thing I teach instructors to diagnose, too.

Measure it, or you're guessing. Every instructor development course I run ends with a pre/post assessment and a performance task, and I report normalized gain rather than raw percentage points — because raw gain flatters courses taught to beginners and punishes courses taught to experienced people. If an engagement of mine didn't move the numbers, that should be visible.

The methods have to model the content. If I'm teaching cognitive load theory through a wall of dense slides, I've disproved my own lesson. Participants notice this — in Nassau it was the single most repeated observation in the feedback, and it's the highest bar I hold myself to.

Build so you can leave. The measure of an instructor development engagement isn't the week I'm in the building. It's whether the agency can design and deliver its own instruction eighteen months later. That's why every programme ends with participants teaching, and why the standing recommendation is always longitudinal follow-up.

Outside the work

Based in Portland, Oregon. Fluent in Bahasa Indonesia, functional in Spanish, and reliably the person on a project who asks what the acronym stands for.