My week with Cadet Command Curriculum Board…

I had a good last week at Fort Monroe Virginia (actually Hampton Virginia home to the beautiful campus of Hampton University). I was lecturing, along with my friend Morgan Darwin, Army leaders that run ROTC programs throughout the nation on new techniques to develop adaptability and raise the bar on professionalism. I only lectured for two hours, but most importantly talked to several leaders in Cadet Command about how to get better at developing their cadets.

Work remains to be done, adapting their curriculum and program of instruction to the adaptive leader methodology, but Major Chad Foster, course director of the Military Science 3 (juniors) at the United States Military Academy’s Department of Military Instruction (DMI), hard work is helping out. Chad has worked every day since April (when we first met) changing lesson plans to ones applicable to the ALM model.  Each lesson, or most of them, now begin with a Tactical Decision Game, but more importantly, it is the way the teachers facilitate the classes that is key. They do not lecture by power point any more, but instead drive the students to seek the answers for themselves.

Well, anyway, back to Cadet Command, I lectured a room of Professor of Military Sciences (the bosses of each ROTC detachment) and a couple of Senior Military Instructors or SMIs (senior Non commissioned officers), and many bought into ALM.  The biggest question was where can I get materials that will allow me to put ALM into practice? This is not laziness, it is reality, these guys are very busy, so if we can take the burden of creating new materials on the ALM model, as Major Foster at West Point has done, and allow them to translate to their programs, that will help. The PMSs also have to get buy in from the rest of their cadre, and that can be easy or hard depending on the quality of cadre they have in their programs.

Anyway, in the spirit of selfless service, Chad sent me all the lessons, several he and his new instructors had practiced with two weeks ago when I was at West Point, and we are going to post the lessons on the Cadet Command Black Board, as well as send to the PMSs and SMIs at that lecture. What helped me as well was I was followed by CSM (ret.) Morgan Darwin, who gave a fantastic lecture on Outcomes Based Training (similiar to ALM, parallel but different language).

So, I keep pounding away at reforming Army leader development (I lump training and education together under development). I am off for ten days to Forts Gordon and Benning to do my workshops to various courses at those two Army posts. I will monitor periodically during this time, but get back to full posting after 30 August.  I get a week back here, then hit the road again for Fort Huachuca and other places to teach how to use ALM.

Don