Getting a certificate means you showed up. It does not necessarily mean that you participated, were engaged, or that you learned anything. Sadly, the only question we often get asked after attending a workshop, seminar, course, conference, or webinar is, “Did you get a certificate?”. While it may be important to have that as part of your training record, we seem to confuse showing up and receiving a certificate with learning.  While you might gain insights and actionable takeaways during the training, learning is a longer-term process and requires some ongoing effort on your part … [Read more...]

In a recent FS (Farnam Street) Brain Food newsletter Shane Parrish shared the below except from his book Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results: “Too often, the people we ask for feedback are nice but not kind. Kind people will tell you things a nice person will not. A kind person will tell you that you have spinach on your teeth. A nice person won’t because it’s uncomfortable. A kind person will tell us what holds us back, even when it’s uncomfortable. A nice person avoids giving us critical feedback because they’re worried about hurting our feelings. No … [Read more...]

Recently Steve Magness, the author of Do Hard Things, a must-read book for trainers, had a LinkedIn post with an important message for trainers. The tag line for the post was “Consistency trumps just about anything else. Stay in the game.” In the post he states, “A key to elite performance is staying in the game long enough to allow your talent to fully express. A rush to greatness can often impede our development.”  Magness lists four keys in this journey: Continual professional development of police trainers is a critically important, but often overlooked and undervalued component of … [Read more...]

There has been a considerable amount of discussion in recent years on how police trainers can enhance the training we deliver using principles and concepts grounded in, and informed by the research on teaching, training, coaching, and learning. Those principles and concepts include: Forward thinking trainers are striving figure out how to apply these principles guided by a vast body of academic literature, some research papers which have explored the application of some of these principles in specific areas of police training, and work being done in the world of … [Read more...]

I am an advocate for trainers thinking more like scientists. This requires that we do the research on learning, teaching, training, and coaching, formulate a hypothesis on how we can use the information obtained to ground and inform our training and then run a series of small experiments to test and modify our hypotheses.  In his book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know Adam Grant writes about the importance of developing a scientist frame of mind and mode of thinking. In this post, which is longer than most, I will share some quotes from the book and the … [Read more...]