Well over a decade ago Proctor and Gamble was feeling the competition from other soap companies who were competing for the mopping public. There were new and improved mopping formulas and even different types of mop heads like the sponge with the green scrubber my wife liked. The old-fashioned mop head with dread locks was still around but the soap competition was heating up.

Proctor and Gamble had more chemists with PhD’s working for them than any other company in the world at the time, as they started their research for a new and improved soap to win the mopping public back. The researchers spent millions of dollars developing new detergents that could clean anything that you could spill onto your floor. The problem was that most of these new formulas also took the top few layers of flooring with them.  This problem persisted as they attempted to create a powerful cleaner that would not harm different types of hard flooring surfaces. After two years of research the team of chemists was still no closer to solving the problem and the company had to decide what to do next.

The company leaders chose to send the problem to Continuum, a firm of engineers and consultants that help with innovation and design for businesses. They didn’t have chemists or the research facilities of Proctor and Gamble but they agreed to research the problem and see how a better soap could be developed for mopping floors. They chose not to start in a research lab but instead they hit the streets (or the kitchens) of America to figure out how to develop a strategy to solve P&G’s problem.

Continuum’s design researchers started visiting the average home to watch people mop their floors. They noticed several important things over the course of several months. The average kitchen floor was washed once a week and it required a lot of hot water and detergent for washing and then more hot water for rinsing. Just by watching a lot of people mop their floors they found that people spent more time cleaning the mop than cleaning the floor. They also discovered that most of the so-called dirt on the floor is not sticky, adhering dirt, it’s just dust. And water turns out to be a particularly bad way to get rid of dust because the dust will just float to the surface and then settle down in the form of mud.

Anyone could probably attest to their final finding, that almost no one enjoys washing the floor and touching a dirty mop, but the design researchers verified it, and instead of ignoring it because it was so obvious, they paid attention to it because it was so universal. One researcher wanted to see what the homeowners would do for a small spill so he made it appear that he accidently spilt his coffee on a floor that was just mopped. He apologized and asked the woman if he could mop the spill up for her. She said, “of course not, I’ll get it” as she walked over and pulled a paper towel from the roll on the counter. She went to the sink and ran some water on the towel and then wiped up the coffee spill and threw it all in the trash. They repeated the exercise with many others just to see the same response. No one got the mop back out because it was too big of a hassle to mix up the detergent and water and later clean the mop over a small spill.

They put all of their research together and instead of proposing how to formulate new soap for the old mop they proposed that a single sheet of paper could entrap dust—since dust was most of the problem—and created the Swiffer. The new design would replace the water, the chemicals in the detergent, the time and back strain associated with filling buckets, and the energy needed to heat the water. Of course, they also created the Swiffer WetJet, which uses a spray of cleaning agent to spot-clean caked-on dirt, if and when necessary.

By addressing both the technology and the users’ desires, Continuum helped to create a sustainable solution with the Swiffer, one that provided value to both P&G and the consumer while reducing the total impact on the environment. They realized that society didn’t need a better soap for their mops – society needed to replace their mops.

We should always look for new ways to improve and update the training we offer our cops and cadets. And then there are times when our training needs to have a complete overhaul, like the Swiffer. When you instruct, you are responsible for passing along wisdom – not just information. Engaged cops and cadets are enthusiastic to learn and become active participants in their own training. To create productive, memorable, and vibrant classes, an instructor must continually work on increasing audience participation. A good format will include group discussions, lectures, guest speakers, case studies, review games, and other activities.

Active learning and audience participation may require more from you as an instructor but, the payoff for the audience is worth it. Your efforts will benefit them with a deep understanding of the topic and prepare them for the tasks that lay ahead. I gave you “Rolling the Dice” in my article last week as a way to pull your students into the lesson you are teaching. These methods do not need to be complicated to work well with your class. The following method is also short and sweet but sure to have everyone involved with your topic.

Patrol Partners

Partnering up is a quick and easy way to involve everyone in the audience. When your topic does not allow enough time for other, more involved activities and exercises, have the students partner up with the person sitting next to them. It helps cadets form a personal bond with one of their peers as they discuss the topic, research a handout together, respond to a question, or compare their work. They learn to count on each other and trust others for back-up, a valuable lesson for law enforcers.

Placing questions throughout your slide show works well with Patrol Partners. Each time a question comes up, let the pairs quickly discuss their answer and check their notes before you choose someone to answer. Your students will see the value in seeking the opinion of others when time allows.

Any instructor reading this article can probably think of a curriculum that should be completely replaced, and we all realize there is always room for minor improvements in everything we do. We do not need to replace the mop every time we teach a topic but there is usually room for some fiddling. The best instructors are constantly fiddling with their format, slides, handouts, and materials to make the entire presentation better.  Learn to enjoy the fiddling, and the feeling that comes from knowing your next audience is in for an encounter – not just an education.

“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” ~C. S. Lewis

Richard Neil is LET’s Police Training Contributor. He is the author of “Police Instructor: Deliver Dynamic Presentations, Create Engaging Slides, & Increase Active Learning.” He is a retired city cop, and instructs for several of Ohio’s criminal justice training academies. He can be contacted through his website that is dedicated to law enforcement training resources – www.LEOtrainer.com.

Our audience of law enforcers and cadets learns best by doing, and any activity that provides them with a direct experience will help them understand more effectively. You can design your own experiential activities or adapt those created by others to gain the participation of your audience. These activities can add relevance and understanding where a lecture and bullet points cannot. I created Neil Island with the help of my daughter, Nadia. I originally created the exercise to force students to take a deep look at the components of our criminal justice system, but it works well with other topics including Community Policing, Community Diversity, Crime Prevention, Crisis Intervention, and others. You can decide how it best fits your students or topic, and feel free to change the activity to make it work for your audience.

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” ~Aristotle

Neil Island

Break your class up into small groups, and provide them with copies of the following story (or display it on the screen or white board).

You have joined others in starting a new society on Neil Island, but even with a careful selection process, crime has become an issue. There is a prison, but it only has room for five people. They will each have their own cell, but they must share the common areas like bathrooms and the recreation facilities. There is no separation available, and no system of parole or probation exists due to financial cuts.

Queen Nadia (my daughter wanted to be queen of Ohio, but she had to settle for an island instead) has issued a proclamation to deal with this scourge on society by setting an example. Your citizens will decide the fate of the following people who have been convicted.  The prisoners include:

1. A 50-year-old man who hired a hit-man to kill his son-in-law. The victim was physically abusing the suspect’s daughter for years.
2. A 27-year-old single mother of two convicted of a DUI accident that killed a 38-year-old man. He was a devoted husband and the father of three kids.
3. A 16-year-old burglar who was caught stealing an XBox from a neighbor’s house. He cooperated and confessed to three other burglaries in the area.
4. A 37-year-old man who abducted and repeatedly raped a 5-year-old girl. She was rescued after 10 days of captivity.
5. An 18-year-old gang member who was a passenger in a car that was involved in an armed robbery. A pursuit of the vehicle resulted in a crash that killed a police officer. She left a husband and her 6-month-old infant behind.
6. A 41-year-old man arrested while driving a stolen car. The car belongs to a missing woman who has never been found. The man has a previous conviction for rape.
7. A 26-year-old male teacher who had a consensual relationship with a 15-year-old student. The student said he loved his teacher and admitted that they were sexually involved.
8. A 13-year-old male who was caught molesting his two female cousins, ages 3 and 6. He has no criminal record but the victims’ parents want him locked away forever.

The citizens must follow the sentencing options based on the Queen Nadia’s proclamation, the available space, and the budget set for confinement.

1. One person must be executed. Try to make this a unanimous decision among your group.
2. One person must receive life in prison without parole.
3. One person must receive 20 years in prison.
4. One person must receive five years in prison.
5. One person must receive three years in prison.
6. One person must receive six months in prison.
7. Two people must go free with no punishment or court controls of any type.

Give the teams 20 to 45 minutes to work on their list (depending on the size of your groups). Some groups will want the option to give up. Force them to choose a sentence for each person. As officers, they will not have the option to give up. They need to experience the reality that some decisions in their career will be difficult to make. No one will want the responsibility of making them – they must make them just the same.

Each group must indicate who they executed and why. They must explain what influenced their decisions on who received the harshest sentence compared to the lightest. Have each group present their choices to the class and then compare the differences.

Did they lock up the 13-year-old? Will he simply become a better predator from the experience with other sex offenders all around him? Was he a victim himself? Most groups choose to execute the 37-year-old child abductor instead of the man who committed a premeditated murder even though capital punishment is not an option for such a crime in the real world. Ask them how they can rationalize such a decision? There are dozens of questions you can ask based on their discussions.

Ask how many members in a group had a difference of opinion. Go through the list one by one discussing the good and bad reasons for execution, imprisonment, or giving that particular person another chance. Some groups choose to release the 26 year old teacher who molests a student back into society because they see the word “consensual.” Students do not yet have the wisdom of a veteran officer, who understands a sexual predator uses the position of a teacher to find victims and the authority of the position to control them, but through exercises like Neil Island you can provide them with a valuable lesson. Talk about the ethics of our legal system as well as its inherent flaws.

Begin a class discussion by asking, “Do we really need services like probation, parole, child protective services, psychiatric hospitals, and rehabilitation centers?” Encourage an in-depth discussion on the importance of social services and incarceration, including the improvements that are needed in our current system. Ask them “What was the most frustrating part of the activity for you?”

This is one of the most compelling experiential activities that I have created. Deep discussions and strong arguments will occur. Be a facilitator and let the students control their group discussions. Stay out of their way unless they are getting completely off-track. Walk around and listen to their discussions, and take your own notes to use for the end of the exercise. The students will look at the different services in a new light when they are burdened with the responsibility to make decisions that will affect the community, the victim, the suspect, and both of their families.

Neil Island is thought-provoking and involves emotional situations that create a challenging activity for students, so make sure you have enough time before using this experiential activity. This activity can last 45 to 90 minutes depending on your class size and the depth of their discussions.

Neil Island is just one of the many activities illustrated in the book “Police Instructor: Deliver Dynamic Presentations, Create Engaging Slides, & Increase Active Learning.” I have placed a PowerPoint presentation of the activity at www.LEO-Trainer.com/games for you to download and use to create an active learning environment for your students.

Police Instructor is a student-centered handbook filled with active learning techniques, and even more experiential activities like Neil Island, for you to use as you develop worthy guardians for society. Consider developing your own activities and exercises from the cases that have challenged you, and then share them with other instructors so your experiences will benefit others throughout the law enforcement community.

Richard Neil is LET’s Police Training Contributor. He is the author of “Police Instructor: Deliver Dynamic Presentations, Create Engaging Slides, & Increase Active Learning.” He is a retired city cop, and instructs for several of Ohio’s criminal justice training academies. He can be contacted through his website that is dedicated to law enforcement training resources – www.LEO-Trainer.com.

are the backbone of the education system in America, and the police academy is no exception. While I like to highlight the increased value of active learning, the lecture will always have a place in the learning process. Lecture can be an excellent method to convey information when it is done well; however, active learning – which requires students to discover, discuss, demonstrate, and explain the information – is more suited to our audience. The two methods should be combined by the police instructor to create Spellbinding Lectures.

“I hear and I forget. I see, I remember.
I do, I understand.” ~Confucius

Confucius was onto something. Knowing the learning styles of most cops and cadets, we can add to his declaration for the police instructor.

• When I only hear information, I may forget some. (Lecture)
• When I hear and see information, I will remember. (Add videos, pictures, and images to the lecture)
• When I hear, see, discuss, and question the information, I understand. (Add group exercises to the lecture)
• When I demonstrate and teach others the information, I become proficient and skillful. (Add students teaching exercises and activities to the lecture)

Lecturing is still the most efficient way to impart knowledge and communicate large amounts of material in a short amount of time, but that does not mean that everyone is retaining that knowledge or is even awake. For the younger generation of law enforcers, who have grown up in an active world filled with attention-grabbing commercials and video games, a lecture can be painful.

Learning is not guaranteed just because we pour out information on a particular topic. Active lectures emphasize the real world in a classroom, something our audience needs. The involvement of our audience is necessary before any real learning can occur. With active involvement, the student is seeking an answer to a question, or information to solve a group problem, or a technique necessary to perform a skill.

Any teaching method can be good or bad depending on how that method is applied, and lecturing is the best possible method in some instances. We need to lecture with three learning domains in mind: the “head” (knowing), the “heart” (feeling), and the “hands” (doing).

Heads, Hearts, & Hands

Bloom’s Taxonomy breaks the objectives into three domains: Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor.

Skills in the cognitive domain (the head), revolve around knowledge, comprehension, and critical thinking of a particular topic. Giving a quiz would require the student’s to access their cognitive domain. Skills in the affective domain (the heart), include emotional reactions and empathy. Talking to cadets about the results of child abuse or another particularly emotional subject would rouse this domain. Skills in the psychomotor domain (the hands) are identified by the ability to physically manipulate a tool or instrument. Teaching a cadet the proper way to load and fire a gun would be one way to stimulate this domain.

Demonstrating for the class how to search a prisoner only reaches their cognitive domain (the head). But when the students demonstrate the same technique on each other, a psychomotor skill (the hands) can be developed. While skills associated with the psychomotor domain are retained at high levels in the brain, repetition is still the key. Showing a video of a jailer being stabbed by a prisoner who was poorly searched will also connect their affective domain (the heart) to round off the learning experience.

If you want to be effective as an instructor, think along the lines of Bloom when you are lecturing. If we involve these three areas in our lectures – using different techniques and exercises – we will produce a better class of guardians for society.

Keep them Moving

Anytime we can get our students moving around, it increases their potential to learn and serves to keep their heads off the table – both are of interest to instructors. Dr. David A. Sousa is a consultant in educational neuroscience whose research has provided educators with strategies for improving student learning by simple physical interaction. “It seems that the more we study the [brain], the more we realize that movement is inescapably linked to learning” (Sousa, 2000). The Richipedia interpretation: Get cadets moving around, and it will kick their brains into gear.

“Today’s brain, mind and body research establishes significant links between movement and learning. Educators ought to be purposeful about integrating movement activities into daily learning (Jensen, 1998)”. This research should inspire us to keep our lecture active whether by having a cadet fill in the blanks on a worksheet or by having them demonstrate their newly acquired skills.

“By engaging active and emotional pathways (the ‘how’ and the ‘wow’), we supply an additional ‘hook’ for learning.” (Jensen and Dabney, 2000).” In other words, physical activity and emotional content activate more of the brain, and that enhances retention.

A Nuclear Physicist’s Take on Lecture

Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) was an Italian-American physicist known for the development of the first nuclear reactor. He also made contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear physics, and statistical mechanics. He was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity. Fermi is widely regarded as one of the leading scientists of the 20th century, and along with Robert Oppenheimer, he is frequently referred to as the father of the atomic bomb. All-in-all, he sounds like a smart guy. After attending a Physics lecture at the University of Chicago, he stated: “Before coming here, I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture, I’m still confused, but on a higher level.”

The essence of training is creating an experience that will provoke thought and learning. Training should be about learning the realities of law enforcement – not just learning information to pass a test. Real training cannot take place when the audience is asked to do nothing. A lecture must be conducted with the audience in mind, or anyone can feel lost, even a genius who is capable of inventing a nuclear bomb.

You can combine a variety of methods to provide cadets with a compelling lesson. Variety is the spice of life and the spice of Spellbinding Lectures. You can trick out your lecture and captivate any law enforcement audience by using examples, techniques, exercises, and methods that encourage active learning.

Richard Neil is LET’s Police Training Contributor. He is the author of “Police Instructor: Deliver Dynamic Presentations, Create Engaging Slides, & Increase Active Learning.” He is a retired city cop, and instructs for several of Ohio’s criminal justice training academies. He can be contacted through his website that is dedicated to law enforcement training resources – www.LEOtrainer.com.