Benjamin Steiner

How I got here

I started my career in international development, not policing. And it started in a classroom — first as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Indonesia, then professionally across the globe.

The first time I ran a teacher training, I knew it was the work I wanted. In West Timor, opening programming in a new province, I watched well-built curricula fail for one reason: they weren't tailored to the people in the room. Teachers, whether in refugee schools in Myanmar or a law enforcement classroom in Portland, Oregon, were being done a disservice — nobody was supporting their development. The result was clear enough: failing test scores in Indonesia, training that wasn't working in the United States.

Education, in so many settings, wasn't accomplishing its goal, because it wasn't asking the right questions. Is this a knowledge gap? Do we know the best way to transfer this information to participants? Do they need to discuss their challenges, or practice it in a scenario? How can we change what people actually do, not just catalog what they sat through?

My last traditional classroom was a year teaching high school at the Instituto Anglo Britanico in Monterrey, alongside remote design work — a deliberate return to the room, because it's easy to lose the feel for what an audience does with your material once you only build it for other people to deliver.

Ultimately I stepped away from the traditional classroom and shifted my focus to police training. No other education job offered the critical stakes policing did, and I believe my skillset and experience can set agencies up for success. That's a belief backed by data, gathered from the Caribbean to Portland.

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, with my beautiful wife. Fluent in Bahasa Indonesia, intermediate in Spanish. When I'm not training for work, I love training for athletic events: martial arts tournaments, races, triathlons. A fairly decent boxer, and aspiring to be decent at jiu-jitsu.