You Aced the Academy

Why did reality hit so hard?

Most first responders have seen this firsthand. Officers, firefighters, or medics perform well in training. They pass tests, hit standards, and execute drills cleanly. Then they go to the field. Conditions shift, information is incomplete, stress is high, and the performance does not look the same.

This gap is not a failure of effort or motivation. It is a failure of how we understand learning.

Ecological dynamics offers a powerful starting point. It shows that skill does not live inside a person as a stored technique. Skill emerges through continuous interaction between the responder and the environment. Perception and action are inseparable. What you see shapes what you do, and what you do reshapes what you see. From this perspective, training only works when it reflects the realities of the field, including uncertainty, variability, and time pressure.

What ecological dynamics does not fully spell out is how responders come to inhabit those interactions. In other words, it explains how skill emerges, but not the different ways people come to know what they are doing while they are doing it. To make sense of that, we need Vervaeke’s four Ps of knowing.

The Four Ways Responders Know

The four Ps describe complementary forms of knowing that together make up professional competence: knowing that, knowing how, knowing what it is like, and knowing by being. I will give a brief outline of these concepts here, but for more information see this paper by Vervaeke.

Propositional knowing is knowing that. It includes facts, concepts, and rules. A semi-automatic pistol uses a magazine. Deadly force may be used when an officer reasonably perceives a risk of serious bodily injury or death. These are things you can say, write down, or test on an exam. Most academies start here.

Procedural knowing is knowing how. It is the ability to act. Drawing a firearm, applying a tourniquet, clearing a room, talking to a subject, coordinating movement with a partner. This is the doing side of training and the focus of skills blocks in trainging.

Perspectival knowing is knowing what it is like. It is situational awareness in the deepest sense. Reading a room. Sensing when a subject’s behavior is shifting. Picking up on subtle threat cues. Recognizing when de-escalation is opening up or when danger is increasing. Perspectival knowing shapes judgment in real time and determines which skills get used and when.

Participatory knowing is knowing by being. It is identity, presence, and engagement. It is what it feels like to occupy the role of responder in a real system where actions have consequences. This form of knowing underlies intuition, adaptability, teamwork, and the ability to function as part of a larger whole rather than as an isolated technician.

All four matter. The problem is not that traditional training includes the wrong elements. The problem is how they are approached.

The Traditional Model and Its Limits

Most training programs follow a familiar sequence. First, teach the information. Then drill the skills. Then run scenarios. Finally, assume that experience will turn the trainee into a professional. In terms of the four Ps, this means propositional and procedural knowing dominate the early stages of training, while perspectival and participatory knowing are left until the end.

That ordering matters because time matters. When perspectival and participatory knowing are delayed, they receive the least attention, the least repetition, and the least design effort. They are treated as outcomes that will emerge naturally rather than capacities that must be deliberately cultivated. Training devotes most of its resources to facts and techniques and relatively little to developing what it feels like to operate as a professional in real situations.

At the same time, perspectival and participatory knowing never fail to develop. They are always present. The issue is not whether trainees are learning these forms of knowing, but what they are learning them about. Shooting on a range teaches what it is like to shoot on a range. It also teaches how to participate as a student in an academy system where success is defined by scores, commands, and compliance.

Most traditional training does not reliably teach is what it is like to be an officer interacting with people, making use-of-force decisions under uncertainty, and carrying those decisions out in real time. This suggests that the perspectives and identities being formed are misaligned with the demands of the job.

When training is built around decontextualized drills, the strongest learning occurs in the wrong place. Procedural skills become tuned to stable, predictable environments. Perspectival awareness becomes oriented toward targets, timers, and instructors rather than toward people, risk, and consequence. Participatory knowing anchors identity in being a trainee who performs for evaluation rather than an officer who must act responsibly in a complex social system.

The result is learning that does not reliably transfer. Performance looks strong in training yet degrades when conditions change. The problem is not that deeper forms of knowing were absent, but that they were cultivated in contexts that do not match the realities responders face.

Flipping the Learning Model

Ecological dynamics and the four Ps point to a different sequence.

Instead of beginning with information and technique, learning begins with participation. From the start, trainees are placed in meaningful, representative situations where they must act, coordinate, communicate, and respond to uncertainty. They are treated as responders rehearsing for their future role.

From this participatory base, perspectival knowing grows. Trainees learn what situations feel like. They begin to recognize what matters, what is changing, and what is possible. This is the engine of adaptive performance.

Procedural knowing follows. Skills emerge through repeated interaction with varied environments. Techniques become flexible and responsive rather than memorized steps. Responders act not because they were taught a move, but because the moment calls for it.

Propositional knowing is not removed from the process. It is woven into it. Trainees learn the language, concepts, and rules of the job while they are doing tasks designed to look like the job. Legal standards, policy boundaries, medical principles, and tactical concepts are introduced in direct connection to what just happened or what is about to happen. The words now point to something the trainee has actually experienced rather than to an abstraction.

This timing matters. When propositions are learned in the middle of action, they become anchors rather than trivia. A use-of-force standard is no longer a sentence in a policy manual. It is the explanation for a decision the trainee just made. A medical concept is no longer a definition memorized from a book. It is the reason a particular intervention worked or failed under pressure.

This kind of learning sticks because it is grounded in experience. The propositions are not memorized and stored for later use. They are built into participatory, perspectival, and procedural knowing that already exists. When responders encounter a similar situation months or years later, the language and rules come back online quickly because they are tied to how the situation felt, what mattered in the moment, and what actions were possible.

This flipped model is not exotic. Most people have already learned this way.

Riding a Bike and Responding Under Pressure

Your parents did not teach you to ride a bike by bringing you into a room and lecturing you on the parts of a bicycle, the rules of the road, or the physics of balance. They did not have you practice pedaling on a stationary bike until your form was perfect. They put you on a modified bike and let you try. Maybe it had training wheels. Maybe it was a balance bike with no pedals at all. Either way, the bike was adjusted so you could ride without constant failure.

When you wobbled, they offered a word of guidance or a steadying hand. As you improved, the supports changed or disappeared entirely. The learning happened through doing.

You learned the language of bike riding along the way. You picked up the names of the parts, the rules, and the concepts while you were riding, not before. Those words meant something because they were attached to sensations, mistakes, corrections, and small successes. When someone said “pedal faster” or “look where you want to go,” you knew exactly what that meant because you had felt it.

That kind of learning sticks. Years later, even if you have not touched a bike in a long time, you still know how to get on, push off, and ride away. The knowledge comes back online quickly because it was never just memorized. It was built into your experience of acting in the world.

When we say that something is “like riding a bike,” we usually mean that it comes back easily, even after years without practice. Riding a bike is not inherently easier than many other skills we consider highly perishable. What makes it different is how it was learned. Bike riding is learned in a participatory way. You learn it by being a bike rider in the world, not by studying bike riding from the outside. That participatory foundation gives rise to perspective, skill, and language, all built on real experience. The result is learning with unusually high retention and transfer. If that is true, then the question for training is simple and uncomfortable. How much of what we do allows learners to participate in the job from the start, and how much of it delays that until later?

Evidence From the Field

The study I discussed in the last post supports this approach. A large randomized trial in an English police force examined a revised public and personal safety training curriculum built around realistic, scenario-based conflict management. Officers who completed the training were significantly less likely to use force in the weeks following instruction, especially hands-on physical force. Civilian injuries decreased. Officer injuries did not increase.

What mattered was not new rules or techniques. It was how learning was structured. Officers trained in environments that required perception, coordination, communication, and adaptation under pressure. Learning began with participation, and other forms of knowing developed from there.

While the study did not use the language of ecological dynamics or the four Ps, its results align with the flipped model. Training grounded in meaningful action appears to transfer more reliably.

What This Means for First Responders

This does not mean facts and fundamentals are unimportant (although fundamentals may not be what you think they are). It means their effectiveness depends on when and how they are introduced.

When training begins with participation and perspective, silos start to dissolve. Communication, situational awareness, decision-making, de-escalation, firearms, and medical skills appear together, just as they do on real calls. Knowledge becomes lived rather than memorized.

The core lesson is simple but challenging. Performance in training does not guarantee performance in the field if the training does not mimic the field in important ways. If we want learning that transfers, we must design training that reflects how responders actually come to know, decide, and act under real conditions.

That requires flipping the model.