What changed, and how we know

Situation

A 2024 on-site assessment recommended instructor development for the Jamaica Constabulary Force. Two years later PADF brought me in to deliver it at the National Police College of Jamaica — twenty-four training staff of varying ranks, drawn from the Crime Portfolio Division and the Marine Division. Unlike a recruit cohort, these were experienced people who already knew a good deal about instruction. That changes both the design and the measurement.

Approach

Five days, co-taught with Dr. Paulette Feraria, Curriculum Consultant for the JCF. Presentation skills built iteratively across the week rather than front-loaded. Three adult learning theories taken in depth — andragogy, cognitive load theory, the Socratic method — each applied immediately to participants' own teaching. Facilitation practised live on the real obstacles to applying theory inside the JCF. Cathy Moore's "is it training?" flowchart used to analyse actual training gaps in the force, then ADDIE and curriculum development to show how course-level design scales.

Results

Every participant passed the post-test. The cohort moved from 53.8% (7 of 13 items) to 92.3% (12 of 13) — 38.5 percentage points. But because they started from a strong baseline, raw gain understates the effect. Hake's normalized gain measures learning against the improvement actually available to a group, and the cohort scored 0.83: they captured 83% of the distance between where they started and a perfect score. That sits in the high-gain band associated in the literature with interactive-engagement instruction rather than lecture.

It is clear that Ben is a master facilitator. Just by his presence facilitating I was able to gain new skills.

JCF participant, National Police College of Jamaica

Learning was taking place every day, and participants will benefit greatly, and the organization at large will improve greatly in the delivery of service to Jamaica.

JCF participant

The complicating note

One hundred percent rated the training great or excellent, and the most consistent piece of constructive feedback was that they wanted more: specifically, deeper training on full-scale curriculum development and ADDIE. That's the correct outcome for a foundation course — participants left with the vocabulary and confidence to begin designing instruction, and are now positioned for the harder systematic work. It is also a real gap, and the recommendation on record is an advanced curriculum development course for NPCJ and divisional training staff.

Situation

An on-site needs assessment in Nassau identified a foundational gap: Royal Bahamas Police Force training staff were teaching without formal grounding in instructional design. PADF commissioned a five-day course at the Training College for eighteen participants of varying ranks.

Approach

The same five-day architecture — presentation skills, adult learning theory, facilitation, feedback, and backwards instructional design — but tuned to a cohort with almost no prior exposure to the material. The teaching methods deliberately modelled the principles being taught, which participants noticed and named repeatedly in their feedback.

Results

Participants averaged below 10% on the pre-test and 81% on the post-test. All eighteen passed the final project — a co-taught 25-minute lesson — teaching topics including fire extinguisher use, handcuffing, rank structure and law. Their work demonstrated command of the Socratic method as an instructional tool, cognitive load management, objective development, and course sequencing.

This is one of the best courses I've ever been on in my 22 years of policing.

RBPF participant with 22 years' service

The material presented gave all of the why's to an assignment we as trainees have been doing for so long without proper instructions.

RBPF participant

The complicating note

Across eleven feedback surveys, one participant raised a substantive developmental point: set participation expectations and conduct standards earlier, and project more authority when working across rank and cultural lines. That's a fair note on leading law enforcement training as an outsider, and it changed how I open a course.

Situation

Under Strengthening Guyana Police Force Training to Improve Responses to Vulnerable Populations — a PADF programme funded by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs — the Guyana Police Force needed officers to handle crisis encounters with vulnerable people differently.

The obvious move is to write one course and teach it to everybody. It's also the wrong move. A senior commander and a frontline supervisor need different things from the same subject: the commander sets policy and reviews incidents after the fact, the supervisor is on scene while it happens. Teach them identical material and half the room is being trained for someone else's job.

Approach

Two parallel ten-module curricula built on a shared spine, then deliberately forked by audience. Both cover leadership, procedural justice and legitimacy, emotional regulation, crisis communication and police wellness. From there they diverge:

• Senior leaders get after action reviews and tabletop exercises — the tools of someone accountable for how the organisation responds.
• JOC Academy supervisors get incident debriefing and case studies — the tools of someone in the room when it goes wrong.

Co-authored with Jason Jones and Thomas Datro, then co-taught as a training of trainers for fourteen officers, so the GPF could carry the material forward without us.

Design decisions worth naming

At the Portland Police Bureau the problem was never a single bad class — it was variance. Instruction quality depended on who happened to be teaching. The answer was infrastructure: a standing instructor development programme of fifteen multi-modal courses that has now certified 358 personnel, spanning sworn officers, behavioural health clinicians and administrative specialists.

Alongside it, a department-wide quality assurance programme anchored by 194 formal training observations, giving the division an actual evidence base for curricular fidelity rather than an impression of it. And a standardised lesson plan schema so that consistency is built into the format instructors write in.

More recently, AI integration in recruit training — crisis simulators, automated analysis of survey feedback, and performance tracking tools that shorten the loop between an observation and an instructor acting on it.

Catholic Relief Services needed core software adoption training that would work equally well for a finance officer in Baltimore and a field team in Upper Egypt. The design constraint was not complexity but portability: material that survives translation into ten languages and lands in twenty-three national contexts without being rebuilt each time.

Separately, as Acting Program Manager, I managed roughly one million US dollars in peacebuilding and partnership programming across Cairo and Upper Egypt — the operational counterpart to the design work, and a useful corrective. It is harder to write unrealistic training plans once you have had to fund and staff them.

Human rights curricula delivered to more than 140 Rakhine and Rohingya youth in Sittwe and in Rohingya IDP camps — two communities separated by active conflict, taught the same material. The design question was how to teach universality without erasing the specific grievances each group brought into the room, which is also the subject of the paper I published on the work through Columbia.

The programme was built to outlast me. An on-site training of trainers certified local instructors to deliver the curricula themselves, which is the only version of this work that means anything after the consultant's flight home.