Main Project Capabilities & Focus Areas
Challenge
The Marine Corps' goal to enhance the mental agility and cognitive readiness of small unit leaders will not be realized without instructors who can develop decision making and other complex cognitive skills in their students. The challenge was to define the gold standard Marine instructor, produce a professional development path that leads to instructor mastery, and create an assessment tool that will support the development of instructor skills.
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Solution
CPG developed an Instructor Mastery Model describing what Marine instructors do and how they perform at five different levels of proficiency. The Mastery Model has been adopted by the Marine Corps as Training & Readiness events and learning outcomes. We then developed and validated a set of instructor assessment tools to assess an individual’s current stage of learning and support the formal schools in their continuous instructor development efforts.
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Result
The Instructor Mastery Model is guided by the research literature on cognitive skill acquisition, expertise, and instructor competencies. It is customized to Marine Corps instructors as a result of knowledge elicitation with over 100 Marine and other Service subject-matter experts.
Ten instructor Key Performance Areas, or competencies, are presented in the model, as well as performance indicators describing the nature of an individual’s performance at each of the five stages of development. The Marine Instructor Assessment Toolkit enables accelerated development of instructor skill by providing targeted performance feedback and development goals based on objective evaluations.
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This effort was sponsored by the USMC Training and Education Command and by the Office of Naval Research.
