Military Police

FALL 2014

Military Police contains information about military police functions in maneuver and mobility support, area security, law and order, internment/resettlement, and police intelligence operations.

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MILITARY POLICE . 19-14-2 16 the later stages of the model (see Figure 1). According to Stuart Dreyfus and Patricia Benner, a learner must have an emotional attachment to his or her performance to leave behind the contextualized, compartmentalized, rule- based learning methodology and move beyond the level of competence. 7 An emotional connection to the content and a desire to achieve slowly grow within the learner and are essential to staving off mediocrity and burnout. I posit that the emotion and desire cultivate the ability to assess prudent risk and that the ability to assess risk, in turn, enables confdence. If we consider that the role of the educator diminishes along the path of skill acquisition, then we should not expect certain skill achievement to occur within certain institutions—or at least not in an assessable manner. I argue that—while the early processes (with the whole-task approach used to demonstrate rules and fundamentals) are constrained—as the learner progresses beyond advanced beginner to the competent phase of the skill acquisition model, learning objectives and outcomes must be shifted to better t scaffold type instructional support that cultivates perceptual understandings. The shift to offering instructional support for the development of the enhanced skills necessary for learners to orient themselves within a situation based on information is critical for creativity, innovation, and leadership development. For learners to move from novice to advanced beginner, individual and group exercises must be designed to build upon one another. Practice is essential for learners to build the connections between rules and choices that will eventually enable them to view problems and solutions in a more holistic manner. The injection of experientially based problem-solving techniques lends itself to occupational skills acquisition and the achievement of a level of perceptual understanding of content that enables swift orientation within a complex situation. Given the distributed manner of the Army's educational system, an aggregated experiential level of development must be assumed over the continuum of learning. This aggregated experiential level of development enables a layered assessment process that can be used to test the skills of the learner before and after training to ensure adequate progression; the results, in turn, can be used to address defciencies or expand the curriculum, thereby impacting the differentiation of learning. With the distinguishability provided by the Dreyfus model, trainers assist learners through scaffolding, ensuring that they are adequately challenged within their capabilities and that they progress from directed skills to self-directed applications. As the learners progress through the levels of capability and competency, they gain greater independence in structuring and self-orienting, which is indicative of the expert level. The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition not only provides a tool for trainers to structure curricula Facilitator Instructor Novice Advanced Beginner Competent Profcient Expert Learner Self-Directed Teacher-Directed Figure 1: Role of the trainer Novice Advanced Beginner Competent Profcient Expert Components Context-free Context-free and situational Context-free and situational Context-free and situational Context-free and situational Perspective None None Chosen Experienced Experienced Commitment Detached Detached Detached understanding and deciding: involved outcome Involved understanding: detached deciding Involved Decision Analytic Analytic Analytic Analytic Intuitive Table 1: Skill levels in terms of components, perspective, commitment, and decision 6

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