A Transformative Learning Experience for Civil Servants and a New Direction for Civil Service Pedagogy

“How do you engage policymakers in the classroom?” is a burning question for many trainers of Bangladesh’s civil servants. Since the inception of the country’s national curriculum, rote learning, lengthy written exams, and strict quantitative assessments have been key performance indicators for learners — and civil service training is no exception. The Bangladesh Public Administration Project is challenging these education practices by creating learning communities around interactive pedagogy and training in the civil service.

Bangladesh has made significant strides in economic growth, poverty reduction, and human development over recent decades. The country now aims to achieve upper-middle-income status by 2031 and eliminate extreme poverty. Key development goals include diversifying commercial sectors, strengthening infrastructure, improving healthcare and education systems, and increasing climate resilience through sustainable development. These goals are crucial for Bangladesh to address its demographic challenges, create more jobs, and maintain social stability.

Bangladesh’s civil service is integral to the implementation of effective development policies and strategies. Improving its capacity through innovative teaching methods can directly impact the nation’s trajectory toward its economic and social objectives. As part of this effort, four pedagogy fellows from the Bangladesh civil service spent a month at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), working with Dr. Arnold Howitt to develop their own teaching cases on public policy issues in Bangladesh. Teaching cases are a pedagogical tool used at HKS and other public policy and business schools to equip students for practice through engagement with real-world issues. The cases developed by the pedagogy fellows will be used to train future civil servants in Bangladesh.

For the fellows, this immersive learning experience equipped them with the tools to develop teaching cases, the confidence to lead case-based sessions, and positioned them to be champions of student-focused learning. Through regular seminars with Dr. Howitt, the fellows engaged in open discussions on case development, learning objectives, storyboarding, problem diagnosis, and explored ways to activate classroom participation. In addition to drafting a teaching case, each fellow also drafted a set of associated teaching notes. The experience fostered a shared learning community in which the fellows could get feedback on their drafts and critique teaching cases by experienced case writers. To supplement the case development seminars, fellows observed HKS classroom sessions featuring teaching cases and later debriefed on teaching style and execution with Dr. Sanderijn Cels.

The following section profiles the four fellows, highlighting their teaching cases and the insights they gained through the program.

Rising Tides, Shifting Lives: Afia Rahman Mukta

“Case method allows for a diversity of voices in the classroom as each participant focuses on different aspects of the problem and can exercise their creativity to come up with different policy solutions.” — Afia Rahman Mukta, Senior Research Officer, Bangladesh Public Administration Training Centre

As a climate-vulnerable nation, Bangladesh has one of the most robust natural disaster resilience and risk response systems in the world. Still, the country faces enduring challenges from climate change’s deadly impacts, compounded by an overburdened political economy that drives internal displacement. Civil servant and fellow Afia Rahman Mukta’s case study explores climate-induced migration and its socioeconomic and environmental impact on affected communities.

Afia, with a background in environmental science, has been managing research and training programs for 20 years at the Bangladesh Public Administration Centre (BPATC), one of many civil service training institutes in Bangladesh and the only one that trains all officer-level civil servants. For her, the biggest challenge in training is creating accessible and meaningful learning experiences. When learners can’t connect with classroom lessons, they can’t transfer their skills to solve real world problems and accomplish national goals as public servants. Afia addresses this concern by introducing fieldwork components and critical thinking exercises into her teaching.

After her fellowship, when Afia conducted her first practice-oriented interactive exercise for the Advanced Course of Administration and Development—a cohort of civil servants with approximately 15 years of experience—she noticed a shift in her classroom. “What was most interesting was that even after the class ended and during breaks, students were animated around the issues discussed during the class and moved the discussion outside of the classroom,” she says. This enthusiasm was inspiring because instructors in Bangladesh seldom see students so motivated and moved by what they learn in the classroom.

Additionally, Afia shared that before this fellowship, no community of practice was actively pursuing interactive case-based learning techniques at BPATC; it was an individual effort. The pedagogy fellowship has sparked key conversations on this long-overdue work.

Now, Afia wants to scale classroom impact institutionally and nationally to make systems-level change. After the fellowship, she developed another teaching case addressing the U.N.’s 16^th Sustainable Development Goal: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions, which she hopes will be used at BPATC and at other civil service training institutes across Bangladesh. She is also working to institutionalize a case development program at BPATC.

Rising Prices and the Case of the Onion: Masud Ahmed

“This fellowship empowered me to contribute to creating interactive teaching and learning experiences and creating a curriculum to support that learning process. Participant expectation management is key, and by providing participatory learning experiences, I hope to raise that expectation.” — Masud Ahmed, Deputy Director of Training, Bangladesh Public Administration Training Centre

Fellow Masud Ahmed, a banker turned civil servant, comes from a family of teachers in Jhenaidah, a southwestern district in Bangladesh. He developed his passion for teaching through long hours spent in his brother’s library. Masud now teaches micro- and macroeconomics and, more recently, public procurement for incoming public servants.

Onions are a staple in the Bangladeshi diet, yet the country’s onion market has faced recurring challenges, leading to sharp price fluctuations. Bangladesh relies heavily on onion imports to meet domestic demand, as local production often falls short due to factors such as unfavorable weather, inadequate storage facilities, and supply chain inefficiencies. Masud’s teaching case examines these issues in the context of trade networks, stakeholder influence, public welfare, consumer behavior, and tensions related to government intervention.

The case allows learners to explore how they would approach issues related to inflation and price hikes as policymakers. “Prices have gone up by 400% in one month; clearly, this is an issue of government policy failure. These are the kinds of issues around which policymakers have to make decisions at their work every day,” affirms Masud.

Incorporating peer feedback into his work was a key fellowship takeaway for Masud, as well as the other fellows. Bangladesh’s civil service is hierarchical, so junior officers are used to passively receiving feedback and instructions from supervisors and senior-level public officials. By contrast, peer-to-peer feedback encourages the horizontal dissemination of learning, a novel concept for the civil service.

Masud is deeply invested in the impact of his sessions. This year, he piloted his case in a classroom of 50 first-year civil servants. Participants were surprised when they had to participate because they’d never done so in a large classroom setting. Now, Masud is writing another case on public procurement, an issue he is passionate about, with the hope of creating more meaningful learning experiences in economics for new civil servants.

Humanitarian Crisis at the Doorstep: Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Abu Saleh Mohammad Obaidullah

With around one million Rohingya refugees fleeing violence in neighboring Myanmar, Bangladesh has one of the largest refugee camps in the world. Bangladesh’s Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commission, also known as Triple RC, faces the daunting task of relief management. Abu Saleh Mohammad Obaidullah’s case explores the challenging dynamics around refugee repatriation as experienced by Triple RC’s commissioner, the decision-making models used in crisis involving vulnerable populations, and the web of international nongovernmental organizations and humanitarian actors during a period of mass immigration in 2017.

Obaidullah’s passion for training and empowering the next generation of leaders comes from his father, who was a civil servant in the Ministry of Information. Obaidullah joined the civil service after college and now teaches courses on governance and administration. Reflecting on his own training, he recalls that the traditional lecture-based methods and mini-case studies he encountered as a trainee failed to inspire him. “There was lack of scope for creativity and critical thinking,” he says. This fellowship has been pivotal for Obaidullah, teaching him the value of thought-provoking teaching cases. Reflecting this, his case invites students to be critical thinkers around pertinent topics such as how to overcome political obstacles and successfully navigate sensitive topics.

Now, Obaidullah not only feels confident as a case developer but also sees himself leading initiatives to develop other case teachers across Bangladesh. This year, he piloted his case with civil servants from the Nepal Administrative Staff College, which trains government and public sector employees in Nepal.

Super Storm, Cyclone Sidr: Razibul Islam

“Designing training is more intentional now as we focus on the skills and how they will be translated into actions on the job. There are still challenges, as we do not have a culture of knowledge transfer, but now, we have a platform and more freedom to go into new directions.” — Razibul Islam, Former Director of Administration, Bangladesh Public Administration Training Centre

The first time Razibul (Razib) Islam faced a climate crisis as a public servant was in 2004 in Sunamganj, when torrential rains affected 6.3 million people. He’d only been in the civil service for a year, but he realized that public managers don’t receive adequate training in crisis management. Then, just three years into his service, he managed the response, relief, and rehabilitation of yet another flood, this time in Sylhet. The following year, Cyclone Sidr, one of the worst natural disasters in Bangladesh’s history, hit his district. On the frontlines again, Razib worked alongside the deputy commissioner of Barguna District — the protagonist of his case, which explores disaster management for Cyclone Sidr.

“Creating a real-life urgent situation in the classroom is the best way to put civil servants in the shoes of a crisis manager,” reflects Razib. As Bangladesh frequently faces climate-related crises, he observes a “warning fatigue,” which is also evident in his classroom, where civil servant trainees often lack motivation to take leadership roles. With a background in political science and experience in tackling crises, Razib believes in practice-oriented professional education that directly links classroom exercises to job responsibilities. He sees case analysis as a way to enhance problem-solving abilities in the classroom with the aim of improved action on the ground.

Razib’s case will be piloted this year at three levels: the foundation-level with incoming civil servants, the advanced-level with deputy secretaries, and the senior level with joint secretaries who have over 20 years of service. He is currently developing three different versions of his case for classrooms ranging from 30 to 60 students. “Challenges still exist in civil service education, case topics can be politicized and learning objectives might be lost, but this fellowship has been a turning point in creating a culture of knowledge transfer across hierarchies in the civil service,” says Razib.

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Supporting trainers to integrate case teaching into civil service training through the pedagogy fellowship is one way the Bangladesh Public Administration Project aims to build a cadre of public servants who are equipped to tackle Bangladesh’s most pressing challenges. The skills developed during case sessions — critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, adaptability, and evidence-based decision-making — align directly with the competencies needed to meet the country’s economic development goals. As Bangladesh seeks to diversify its economy, improve infrastructure, build climate resilience, and reduce poverty, an empowered and well-trained civil service is critical in driving sustainable progress.