The importance of shift training as a crew needs no explanation. For many firefighters, 1-hour training sessions that feature 1 or 2 companies is all they have time to receive. This applies to on duty training led by a Company Officer and weekly training that volunteer departments may organize. It is important to capture this time and use it to its full potential.
As instructors, we know that it is much easier to lose an audience than gain one. Keeping your firefighters engaged in the training can be difficult. Given their experience, some senior members feel basic skills are unnecessary. As for junior members, some desire to be shown advanced skills and be tested.
Balancing all of these wants and needs is not impossible, but easy to get wrong. You should try to approach your lesson development with the mindset of making a 30-minute drill that is so good they turn it in to an hour. Creating and presenting drills and lessons can be challenging. However, if you follow a few basic principles, you can be successful.
Respect
As instructors, our students are the most important element of the drill. At a base level, everything we do must follow this idea. Respect is the cornerstone of keeping the students a priority. Firefighters will give you their all if they feel valued. Simple things, like wearing the same gear or being in the same elements as students show respect. How else can you respect them? Firefighters value their time, and if you respect it, they will be willing to give to you. Firefighters have many responsibilities over the course of their shift. They try and control what they can and plan things such as workouts or meals. When you take that away, you have lost them. When you lose them, the drill will suffer. Additionally, you need to give them time to recover and discuss.
Firefighters are inherently problem solvers. We love to fix things and we often feel a need to fix it now. If you don't give them time to rest, rehydrate and recover you are disrespecting them.
Few things are more disrespectful than a completely unrealistic drill. As an instructor you shouldn't be a pitchman saying "but wait, there's more!" Challenging firefighters is not done by giving them a scenario where a truck pulling a horse trailer crashes into an elementary school that has a mixed occupancy with a meth lab which caught fire during a tornado. Your drill being so complicated that your students get stressed and frustrated is not the sign of a good drill.
There is a fine line between adding stress and harassment. Stress should only be added once excellence is achieved.
Another way to show respect is allowing for flexibility. Being an instructor does not make you the smartest person in the room. Everyone has something of value and may bring a new technique or idea to the training. There is a time and a place for rigid structure, like a new piece of equipment for example, but the drill is not for you it is for them. Allowing flexibility creates buy-in and encourages creative problem solving. Not everyone accomplishes tasks in the exact same way. What works for you may not work for them. Our job as instructors is to show them a way not the way. As long as your objectives are clear, a little flexibility can be a good thing.
This flexibility also needs to continue into your delivery.
Not everyone learns the same way and you need to respect that as an instructor. You may need to repeat things or rephrase them. This is a good thing, that shows you are making a personal investment in others. As you were being trained to instruct, you were taught some rendition of the types of learners. Regardless of what you were taught, the commonality is that there is more than one type of learner. Always keep that in mind when you teach. Figure out what turns your students' gears and capitalize on it.
Not only do you need to respect the students, but they need to respect one another. The drill ground and classroom need to be environments where failure and questions are accepted. As instructors, we must maintain a positive learning environment. No one should be belittled for a mistake or idea. We all grow through failure, so it should never be met with negativity. When you create this environment, more questions are asked and people will naturally want to get better rather than "just get the drill done".
Edit Yourself
Chances are, if you're an instructor you are passionate about the job. You probably get excited at the concept of bettering others and yourself. You need to learn how to focus that energy if you want to be successful. It is easy to let your passion run wild, which sometimes comes at a cost. Professional Chefs can be very meticulous and passionate about their craft. They explore new flavors and ingredients, which gets them excited about the concept of new dishes. Sometimes the best thing that Chef can do is remove a few ingredients or dial things back a little. They refer to this as "editing yourself". These practical changes can sometimes make or break meal.
Passionate instructors suffer the same curse, and sometimes the best thing we can do is evaluate and remove elements of our drills or programs.
Keep the training topics relevant. If you are in Florida, you probably should not be training on surface ice rescue. That may sound obvious, but sometimes we get excited about a new topic we have read about in a magazine or seen at a conference. Not everything is applicable to your department. This can include techniques based on different staffing or specializations. Keep your training relevant to the dynamics of your local department.
Let's say you attended a great drill or class. You probably are excited about the experience and wish you could share it with everyone. There is nothing wrong with this; you probably became an instructor because you wanted to help others learn. The pitfall that comes with this is that you cannot condense and 8-hour drill day into a 1-to-2-hour lesson on shift. Even with great intentions, It's simply impossible. Find out what is most important or break it up in to multiple drills. Either way, you need to manage your own expectations to develop a quality drill based.
This also plays into staying focused on the intent of the drill. As important as hose advancement, ladders and forcible entry are, they do not necessarily need to all be in the same drill. If your focus is on moving hose, sometimes repacking and pulling the line may take more time than it is worth. When you have a limited amount of time to keep people engaged, focus on the intent of the drill. That being said, there is a time and a place for putting it all together. If your intention is to practice multiple skills, such as pulling and advancing a charged line, keep your audience small and be sure to have enough time. Sometimes a smaller audience allows for more evolutions for each firefighter. Once the firefighters are proficient at these skills, now is the time to create scenarios where they put multiple topics together. Scenarios allow them to practice forcible entry and line management together, but not spend time focusing on the small details. Think of it as a scale you can move up and down, breaking the training down into different focused drills.
Clarity
Keeping in mind the respect for the students and controlling your passion for teaching, it is time to write a lesson plan. This part of the process can make or break all of your good intentions. A poorly written lesson plan will likely not be followed, or start the training with a negative note. It needs to be clear for the instructor, who is likely to not be you.
In the 2001 film "Oceans 11" Brad Pitt's character says: "Don't use 7 words when 4 will do". Keep that in mind when writing a lesson plan. You need to get your message across quickly and clearly. Your forcible entry lesson plan shouldn't be so complicated that it needs to be taped to the door. On other words, the instructor should not need to hold your lesson plan in their hand and constantly reference it to teach.
Start with clear objectives using the ABCD method: audience, behavior, condition and degree. Keep in mind these do not need to be in that order. Here are some examples:
"(C) With a 1 ¾" pre-connect, (A) the firefighter shall (B) deploy hose to an exterior door (D) within 1 minute"
"(C) In a zero-visibility environment, (D/A) each firefighter in the company shall (B) force entry on an inward swinging door"
"(C) Following a given scenario, (A) the crew shall (B) select the proper hoseline (D) following Engine Company Operations Tactical SOG 1.1"
Clear objectives are simple to remember and help the instructor understand your intentions. This clarity should continue later into the lesson plan, with a simple outline to explain how the objective can be met. As mentioned above, this is where you need to allow some flexibility. If the objective is to deploy the preconnected line, your outline does not need to specify that it is on the left or right shoulder. Do not overcomplicate your outline. Unless elements of a procedure prevent injury and equipment damage or follow a specific department policy, allow freedom for people to meet the objective in a way that works for them.
When your drill involves a scenario, be extremely clear in what environment firefighters will be operating in. If you hear things like: "can I spray water?" or "can I use my flashlight?" during the drill, you did not write a clear enough lesson plan. On the fireground, limitations are based on what can and can't be done, the drill ground needs to reflect this. It is much easier to establish what students can't do instead of explaining what you think they should do.
For example: Attack lines should be using their stream to control space as they progress through a structure. For years we have told training firefighters when to open the nozzle, instead of when they can't. This creates a training scar, and on incidents the nozzle firefighter waits to open the nozzle until they are told to.
Few things are more annoying for a student than an instructor interrupting to say "no you can't do that". Establish these rules before the drill starts, and let firefighters do what they do. If instructors are staring at your lesson plan, they aren't instructing their students.
They Should Leave Feeling Good
The best drills end with smiling firefighters who can't stop talking about what they did. If everyone is silent after a drill, they probably didn't learn anything. You should do everything in your power to make sure the firefighters leave feeling good. So how is that done?
First, here are some things to avoid. One of the quickest ways for firefighters to not feel good about training is using it as punishment. The sole motivation for training should be the betterment of firefighters. When you use training punitively, firefighters begin to resent it and no longer take initiative to train on their own. As instructors, we should inspire others to seek knowledge and have accountability for their own skills. No one likes to be punished, you have already lost if you attach training to it.
Next, firefighters feeling good after training does not mean to avoid adversity. It is important for some training to be physically and mentally challenging. We cannot grow without being uncomfortable and we cannot feel our limits if we never reach them. Every training that has ever been or will be done involves failure. Failure sounds like such a harsh word, many firefighters fear it. Our responsibility as instructors is to eliminate that fear. Failure is simply an opportunity to learn and improve, you should always emphasize this as an instructor. Even if a student does not succeed in a drill, you can help them feel better by giving them a path forward to learn. Never leave a firefighter without success or a plan to achieve it.
How do we leave them feeling good? We encourage and inspire them by championing their success and supporting their improvement.
Shift training makes or breaks a fire department. Instructors have a responsibility to present great training. Treating firefighters with respect, editing yourself, keeping things clear and leaving them feeling good are all concepts that you can use to develop it. Great training keeps people engaged and is simply enjoyable. Keep firefighters excited to train and they will take your 30-minute drill and willingly spend an hour on it.