Build Faculty Capability Around Outcomes, Evidence, and Transfer
APSI delivers a 14-module, 65.5-contact-hour Faculty Development Program and modular contract services for institutions that teach complex professional knowledge, judgment, and performance. Every module produces a usable faculty work product, from curriculum maps and aligned assessments to complete lesson plans, facilitation strategies, peer-coaching cycles, and learning-science implementation briefs.
Lecture Method, Taught the Way APSI Teaches It
Four short clips from APSI faculty-development instruction. Select a clip to play it.
Connect the Decisions Behind Every Lesson
Complex programs lose coherence when outcomes, teaching methods, assessment, feedback, and transfer are treated as separate tasks. Faculty may be asked to cover more material, adopt a new method, or revise slides without a clear account of what learners must actually know, value, and do, or what evidence would demonstrate it.
APSI helps faculty and academic leaders connect those decisions. The work begins with mission, future performance, learners, context, and constraints; it ends with practical faculty products, visible learner evidence, and a defensible plan for improvement.
A Complete, Scalable Faculty Development Program
Counts are exact: 14 lessons, 65.5 hours, 16 tools and appendices, and one joint-education addendum per lesson.
Built for Institutions That Teach Judgment and Performance
APSI faculty development supports institutions across professional, military, and higher education.
- Professional military education institutions and joint schools
- Defense, federal, and other government training organizations
- Law-enforcement, public-safety, homeland-security, and emergency-management academies
- Universities, professional schools, and continuing-education programs
- Faculty-development divisions, curriculum teams, program directors, and academic leaders
- Organizations onboarding subject-matter experts into instructional roles
Concrete Faculty Products, Not Vague Claims
Every engagement leaves the institution with usable work products.
- Confidential peer-coaching processes grounded in low-inference observation, feedback, rehearsal, and follow-up
- Accessible presentations that integrate message, explanation, visuals, learner action, evidence, and contingency
- A disciplined approach to retrieval, spacing, cognitive load, generation, feedback, stress, emotion, and other learning-science claims
- Aligned mission, program outcomes, course outcomes, lesson objectives, activities, assessments, feedback, and transfer
- Curriculum maps that show contribution, practice, assessment, sequencing, gaps, and change-control decisions
- Observable standards and rubrics that support consistent professional judgment
- Complete, time-feasible lesson plans tailored to learner evidence and delivery constraints
- Purposeful use of lecture, guided discussion, cases, problem-based learning, practice, simulation, wargaming, staff rides, seminars, presentations, and blended designs
- Questioning strategies that elicit reasoning, diagnose understanding, distribute participation, and guide responsive instruction
The Full Program, a Track, a Capstone, or a Custom Scope
APSI can deliver the complete Faculty Development Program, a defined developmental track, a focused capstone, or a customized contract engagement. Final sequencing, prerequisites, application work, and delivery pattern are established during scoping.
| Engagement | Scope | Contact hours | Primary value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Comprehensive Faculty Development Institute | Lessons 1 to 14 | 65.5 hours | Complete sequence with practical work products across foundations, curriculum design, teaching practice, coaching, presentation, and learning science. |
| Faculty Foundations | Lessons 1 to 5 | 15.5 hours | Common language, educational philosophies, adult learning, learner variability, and classroom culture. |
| Curriculum and Lesson Design | Lessons 6 to 9 | 21 hours | Design chain, curriculum map, learning-domain evidence, objectives and standards, rubrics, and a complete lesson plan. |
| Instructional Practice | Lessons 10 to 13 | 24 hours | Teaching-method selection, guided discussion and facilitation, questioning, peer coaching, and effective presentations. |
| Learning Science Capstone | Lesson 14 | 5 hours | Evidence-informed learning design and a disciplined method for evaluating neuroscience-based instructional claims. |
| Customized Contract Engagement | Selected modules and services | Scoped | A tailored combination based on mission, faculty roles, learner needs, approved outcomes, evidence requirements, and institutional constraints. |
Instruction Combined with Applied Consulting
An engagement may combine instruction with applied consulting and development support, including:
- Faculty onboarding and role transition
- Curriculum analysis, mapping, redesign, and change control
- Program, course, and lesson outcome development
- Assessment, rubric, and calibration support
- Lesson-plan and faculty-guide development
- Teaching-method, questioning, debrief, and facilitation coaching
- Peer-observation and peer-coaching system design
- Presentation and instructional-material review
- Learning-science and educational-neuroscience claim review
- JPME and joint-education faculty-development tailoring within the institution's approved governance and policy framework
The Complete 14-Module Curriculum
Fourteen modules move from common foundations through curriculum design, instructional practice, and evidence-informed integration. The complete sequence produces a connected set of faculty work products; defined tracks and individual modules can also be scoped to an institution’s requirements.
How the program is offered
Institutions receive either the module set exactly as listed here or a custom build developed to their own requirements. The program is scalable, so it can be delivered to a single department or across an entire faculty, and it is adaptable, so modules, sequence, contact hours, and applied work can be rebuilt around the mission, curriculum, and constraints an institution already operates under.
Foundation
Common language, philosophy, adult learners, learner variability, and classroom culture.
01Overview and Fundamentals2.5 hours
Establish a common language for education, training, instruction, assessment, learning, and development. Faculty diagnose the alignment of an existing lesson and select one evidence-informed improvement tied to learner, content, context, and constraints.
Participant product: Alignment diagnostic.
02Educational Philosophies3 hours
Compare behaviorist, cognitivist, constructivist, social, experiential, humanistic, and transformative lenses. Faculty identify the assumptions embedded in instructional decisions and defend a blended design without treating any single philosophy as universally correct.
Participant product: Philosophy-to-design defense.
03Adult Learning3.5 hours
Translate adult-learning theory into practical decisions about prior knowledge, relevance, agency, problem orientation, guidance, accessibility, psychological safety, and workplace transfer. Faculty redesign a content-centered segment around a real professional problem and explicit performance standards.
Participant product: Adult-learning redesign.
04Learning and Teaching Styles3.5 hours
Replace prescriptive learning-style matching with an evidence-informed model of learner variability. Faculty distinguish preferences, abilities, strategies, prior knowledge, motivation, accessibility needs, and task demands, and redesign instruction without labeling learners or lowering standards.
Participant product: Learner-variability redesign.
05Creating and Maintaining Classroom Culture3 hours
Treat classroom culture as a designed condition for learning rather than a matter of personality or rapport. Faculty establish norms, expectations, and psychological safety in the opening minutes of a course; sustain them through participation structures, questioning, error handling, and feedback; and repair them when candor, preparation, or professional respect breaks down. The module addresses mixed-rank, mixed-service, interagency, and international seminar rooms, where status, culture, and language shape who speaks and what gets examined.
Participant product: Classroom culture plan and norm-setting sequence.
Design
Curriculum, learning domains, objectives and standards, and complete lesson planning.
06Curriculum Development (ISD/CDS)6 hours
Use Instructional Systems Design and Curriculum Development System practices as iterative, evidence-seeking processes. Faculty connect mission need and graduate role to outcomes, assessment, learning architecture, implementation, evaluation, stakeholder review, accessibility, and change control.
Participant product: Design chain and curriculum map.
07Domains of Learning4 hours
Use cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains to clarify the change a lesson seeks and the evidence that can reveal it. Faculty apply the Modified Bloom's Taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl) and design observable evidence for integrated professional performance.
Participant product: Domain and evidence map.
08Lesson Objectives and Standards of Behavior5 hours
Convert broad intent into student-centered, observable, assessable outcomes. Faculty write action, condition, and standard; align objectives with assessment, activities, and feedback; and construct performance criteria and calibrate judgments using common learner work.
Participant product: Objective-alignment package.
09Lesson Planning: Designing and Tailoring Lessons6 hours
Build a flexible lesson architecture informed by Madeline Hunter, Gagné, explicit instruction, active learning, retrieval, and transfer. Faculty design from outcomes and learner evidence, then tailor sequence, guidance, time, participation, accessibility, and contingency.
Participant product: Complete lesson plan.
Practice
Teaching methods, questioning, peer coaching, and effective presentations.
10Teaching Methods10 hours
Develop a purposeful repertoire across interactive lecture, guided discussion, case method, problem-based learning, demonstration and practice, simulation, wargaming, staff rides, seminars, student presentations, and blended or flipped designs. Selection begins with the required learning, not the method label.
Participant product: Method selection and facilitation revision.
11Questioning Skills4 hours
Design and facilitate questions that elicit thinking, diagnose understanding, guide discussion, distribute participation, and promote transfer. The module modernizes lead-off, anticipated-response, and follow-up structures with wait time, retrieval, evidence use, and responsive decision rules.
Participant product: Questioning map.
12Peer Coaching6 hours
Establish peer coaching as a confidential, goal-directed improvement process distinct from formal supervision. Faculty contract for a focus, collect low-inference evidence, conduct a learner-centered debrief, rehearse an alternative, and plan follow-up.
Participant product: Peer-coaching cycle.
13Effective Presentations4 hours
Treat presentation as an instructional system, not a slide-deck performance. Faculty align message, spoken explanation, visuals, learner processing, interaction, accessibility, rehearsal, audience evidence, and contingency while avoiding rigid slide-count and attention-span myths.
Participant product: Presentation storyboard and segment.
Integration
Learning science, neuromyth resistance, and local evidence for retention and transfer.
14The Latest in Educational Neuroscience5 hours
Translate reliable cognitive and educational science into instructional decisions while separating neural observation, cognitive mechanism, behavioral evidence, and classroom recommendation. Topics include attention, working memory, retrieval, spacing, interleaving, generation, feedback, stress, sleep, emotion, and neuromyth resistance.
Participant product: Claim-evidence-action-limit brief.
Engagements Built Around Real Faculty Work
Faculty development is most useful when participants improve the work they are actually responsible for. APSI structures engagements around authentic institutional and faculty products rather than isolated technique demonstrations.
- 01
Scope the performance need
Clarify mission, future performance, faculty roles, learners, approved outcomes, evidence requirements, delivery conditions, and constraints.
- 02
Select the engagement architecture
Choose the complete program, a developmental track, selected modules, or a combined faculty-development and curriculum-services scope.
- 03
Apply concepts to real work
Participants diagnose, map, design, rehearse, teach, assess, coach, and revise using relevant curriculum and lesson artifacts.
- 04
Use evidence and feedback
Faculty make learner thinking visible, compare performance with standards, receive feedback, and document defensible revisions.
- 05
Support transfer and continuous improvement
The engagement connects classroom evidence with follow-up application, local review, curriculum governance, and future development priorities.
Delivery principle
The 65.5 contact hours may be delivered as a concentrated institute, a distributed faculty-development sequence, or selected modules embedded in onboarding. Prerequisites and spaced application are preserved so participants repeatedly revise real work, practice, receive feedback, and return with learner evidence.
One Core Program. A Distinct JPME and Joint-Education Addendum in Every Lesson.
The core curriculum applies across professional education. Each lesson also includes a separate addendum for Joint Professional Military Education programs, for joint education that sits outside JPME, and for partner-school contexts.
For Joint Professional Military Education programs, APSI support is designed to be tailored to the institution’s approved mission, program and course learning outcomes, assessment plan, authentic performance requirements, faculty responsibilities, classification and security rules, accessibility obligations, and curriculum-governance process. For joint education that is not JPME, the same outcomes-based quality practices apply.
Accreditation statement
APSI Joint Professional Military Education content meets the Process for Accreditation of Joint Education (PAJE) requirements set out in the current Officer Professional Military Education Policy, CJCSI 1800.01G. Coverage extends up to JPME Level 2.
Awarding credit and completing accreditation remain acts of the authorized institution and the controlling Joint Staff processes. APSI supplies the content, faculty capability, and evidence those processes require.
Accreditation consulting: On the military side, APSI consults on the PAJE accreditation process. Our faculty and staff have worked with PAJE and with regional accreditation across multiple colleges, universities, and JPME institutions, including senior service colleges and war colleges.
Download GAO-20-323: Professional Military EducationCurrent policy foundation: CJCSI 1800.01G (2024) and CJCSM 1810.01A (2026).
Download Latest OPMEP G (PAJE)Evidence and Research Basis
APSI uses educational frameworks to organize judgment, not to replace it. Each instructional recommendation must fit the learner, task, evidence, context, and constraints. Legacy models remain where they offer useful functions or vocabulary; their limitations are taught explicitly.
- The Modified Bloom's Taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl) is mapped to the complete learner task, knowledge dimension, conditions, standards, and direct evidence, not assigned from a verb alone.
- Adult-learning principles are treated as design variables to examine, not biological laws attached to age.
- Learning-style matching is not prescribed. Learner variability, prior knowledge, accessibility, strategy, motivation, and task demands guide adaptation.
- Active learning is defined by what learners do cognitively with content, not by whether a method has an active-sounding label.
- Retrieval, spacing, manageable complexity, generation, varied practice, feedback, and transfer are applied with stated boundary conditions.
- Educational-neuroscience claims must show a defensible chain from neural observation to cognitive mechanism, behavioral evidence, and instructional action.
Strengthen the system behind every lesson.
Scope an APSI faculty-development engagement around your institution's mission, faculty, curriculum, evidence requirements, and constraints.