BY JOHN M. BUCKMAN III
Time, money, hardware, software, facilities, instructors, staff, and the level of competencies of incoming trainees always limit training programs. Within these boundaries, training officers have the responsibility to concentrate training programs on the “critical skills.” Many times, training program management is a race.
A model is an abstraction with a definition. Any recognizable order of symbols, letters, or numbers will bring a thought to mind. What does curriculum bring to mind? You must have a clear concept and be able to teach others. If not, curriculum development will suffer from the classic lack of communication.
There are two problems with training officers and their concepts of curriculum. One group has more definitions of curriculum. The other group of training officers doesn’t have a concept of curriculum. Communicating the concept to them is like talking to tribesmen in the deep Sahara about ice.
Curriculum is the race (experiences) you put people through for their learning. Curriculum development is designing where the fire department training program will go and what it will do for our firefighters and, ultimately, for Mrs. Smith when she calls the fire department for assistance. An important part of curriculum development is the critical task analysis (CTA). The CTA is an analysis of expectations, requirements, and performance measures. In addition, the CTA should include what will happen if a firefighter can’t perform the identified skill. The curriculum is designed to prepare the firefighters for the future needs of the department before the test is given. The development of specific courses to meet these objectives is a critical part of the curriculum development process. The curriculum is continuous; the courses are well-articulated segments.
TYPES OF CURRICULUM
Laying out a curriculum cannot be done alone. Unless you explain the concept of training curriculum development to the people working on the curriculum, you will suffer, not benefit, from their exper-tise. You must help them understand the concept of curriculum, or you will end up with one of the following types of curriculum:
• Traditional. This type is level and divided into nice cubicles without connection. Everything is neat and tidy, and all courses are in little 3 3 blocks. The key is that the curriculum must turn out firefighters who are able to do the job at the street immediately. The fire service curriculum is significantly different from many other curriculums used in teaching. Those curriculums provide general information about a vast list of jobs.
• Borrowed-similar but different. There is usually another similar program in the world. The fire service network provides a significant opportunity to examine the other side to see if there is something that you might implement in your own organization. No doubt, elements of another curriculum can be borrowed. Yet, even peer organizations have differences in structure, staffing, equipment, training facilities, and-maybe more important-operating philosophies and procedures. Borrow? Yes. Adopt? No. But it’s tempting.
• Historical. This approach teaches what is familiar, easy, and ego fulfilling, but it may not satisfy the needs of the firefighters.
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There are elements of traditional, borrowed, and historical curriculums that are useful. The segments to be used must be dictated, like the rest of the curriculum, by the outcome of curriculum development models. What matters most in training content delivery is how it impacts service at the street.
CURRICULUM MODELS
Curriculum models are the tools used by management. Parameters for various models are presented below.
Initial training
A get-started curriculum provides basic information about knowledge, required skill sets, abilities, and values. It usually stands alone in development, presentation, and management.
Retraining
This involves an in-service schedule to maintain skills and reintroduce what people once knew, reinforce what they have neglected to apply, and provide practice in infrequently used skills.
Continuing Training
This curriculum concentrates on changes in standards, practices, near-misses, and accidents (inside and outside the organization), as well as internal changes in procedures, rules, and the like.
Advance Training
This curriculum prepares firefighters for advancement in levels of responsibility within the organization.
NEEDS OF THE TRAINEES
The training staff appraises the capabilities of the trainees entering the program. Information on trainees’ potential learning rates can make a major contribution to decisions on how to structure the curriculum. The characteristics of the trainees are noted, as are any obvious egocentricisms. Even though the group consists of successful people, some could have ego problems associated with being students again. And, although their needs are important to curriculum development, the needs of the job are paramount.
NEEDS OF THE JOB
This component can consume most of the time and resources devoted to curriculum development. It requires job analysis, construct analysis, and risk assessment. A job analysis is the systematic dissection of the job for the purpose of determining the skills and the supporting of the knowledge required to be successful on the job. Success includes job safety, efficiency, and effectiveness. Job analysis is conducted by interviews, observations, and use of subject-matter experts, or a combination of these methods.
Job analysis has the following limitations:
• It merely reflects what the firefighter does; it cannot tell you what the firefighter should be doing.
• Given the rapid rate of change in our profession, a job analysis is out of date on completion. If not continually updated, it becomes useless, even dangerous.
• A job analysis works best with hands-on firefighters. Its accuracy fades as job tasks move up the scale to include functions such as monitoring and broad decision making-for example, a captain’s job involves making decisions with limited data in many cases, and a job analysis does not reflect what goes on in the cognitive process required for the job.
The job analysis procedure was created to help decide what training was needed in America’s first mechanized war, World War I. Several innovations have been made over the decades.
The growing need to train people in monitoring and decision-making positions is leading to the emerging field of construct analysis. It comes in part from Australia and has potential for identifying cognitive processes in monitoring and decision-making jobs. It is, however, far from a science. Nevertheless, if you are in the position of having to establish requirements and expectations for a job that entails few hands-on tasks and many monitoring and decision-making tasks, construct analysis may help. This involves conducting in-depth interviews with successful incumbents to identify some of the strategies they use in their work.
Another available tool is risk assessment. In defining the needs of the job, risk assessment can help you determine the frequency of decision-making in jobs where the central functions are to evaluate, order, and structure inevitably incomplete and conflicting knowledge for the purpose of making a correct decision.
The job analysis team begins by identifying the major blocks of the job. Each major block is broken into minor blocks and tasks. Each task is broken into steps. Each step-along with a list of tools and equipment that must be used-is broken into manipulations (skills) and what has to be known to perform the manipulations (knowledge).
All job analyses must be validated. Some job analysis methods obtain a cruciality rating of each task through the judgmental ranking of each with regard to difficulty, frequency, and importance. The three rankings collapse into a single criticality measure. Criticality ratings can be a tremendous aid to instructors during course development.
RISK ASSESSMENT
A broad concept in the fire service, risk assessment in some places means describing everything that could happen in the life of a firefighter generally and what the consequences would be to the organization. In others, it is more specific. Risk assessment can be used to help determine the frequency and type of decision making in jobs where the central functions are to evaluate, order, and structure inevitably incomplete and conflicting knowledge for the purpose of making a correct decision. An expert on decision making might say that all decisions are made under those conditions, but you know what is meant.
The other source of information in a risk assessment is the postmortems of working fires and accidents, which often yield potentially misleading information and usually have significant holes. Most are sanitized by the organization. Interviewing survivors may yield flawed information because they may not remember what occurred because of shock or a natural self-defensiveness.
With all the problems inherent in a risk analysis, interviews and reviews can disclose tremendous content for simulation scenarios for training people operating at the higher levels of decision making-that is, making judgments in short time frames with limited options.
It all adds up. The needs of the job can be defined through job analysis, construct analysis, and risk assessment. You then would know “how the job is.” The next question is, “How should the job be?”
NEEDS OF THE ORGANIZATION
The underlying motive for this block is to ensure that the training program has the input of supervisors, managers, and senior decision makers. They have to trust training, to know that the training function is responsive to their needs. This curriculum model causes an early buy-in, a sense of ownership of the program. Argument over “what’s being taught” after a program is underway can be disastrous. Although there will always be questions about content (which shows interest), this model forces the organization and the training staff to make training a business and to engage in a businesslike effort that starts up front and continues to work throughout the process. The concrete training items to be addressed are the following:
• organizational values,
• potential changes in job expectations, and
• planned changes in technology.
ORGANIZATIONAL VALUE
The question is simple: How does the organization want the incumbents to behave? Which is more important, climbing ladders or putting on SCBA? Finding a street and water supply or driving the apparatus? The trick is to force hard philosophical statements on “How are we going to do business?” There is a pitfall here: Don’t let it deteriorate into a session on work ethics, with management describing the ideal firefighter.
PROGRAM OBJECTIVES
Once the job analysis has identified the items that are nice to know or trainees already know, it is time to generate program objectives. The program is divided into segments, with the program objectives identifying the courses needed to meet the overall objectives. Do not confuse program objectives with measurable learning objectives; they come later from the instructors. Let’s look at one example of program objectives for recruit firefighters.
The program objectives identify broad training areas, often corresponding to (but not limited to) the major blocks identified in the job analysis. Although perhaps not the role of the curriculum committee, one additional administrative task is to be accomplished: establishing a tracking mechanism that will tie each task to a program objective. Building the tracking system so it can follow the tasks into each course and down to each unit of instruction will streamline course updates later.
COURSE OBJECTIVES
The job now of the instructional staff and whatever support staff might exist is to establish course objectives and specifications. Course objectives should be measurable and stated in terms of performance.
Example: Arriving at general course objectives is a mental process with few guidelines or rules. No computer program can do this successfully. The instructors, officers, staff, and others can pull out similar content from job analysis and group it into teachable blocks, again tying each task (by a tracking number) to the appropriate course objective. The time to sequence the courses is when establishing courses for the various personnel. The most common sequence is from simple to complex. Do the reviews, set the basic courses, and build from there to more difficult content.
UNITS OF INSTRUCTION
A unit of instruction is the actual teaching and learning material used in a course by the instructor and trainees, one document for both. In firefighter training, secrets as to what is to be learned are not kept from the students, and guessing games on what is most important to learn and what competencies will be tested should never be played. Remember, the objective is learning. Always let them know what is important to learn. Stating the competencies to be tested does not mean receiving the test questions beforehand.
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The unit of instruction format presented is more than a hybrid lesson plan, although it does contain familiar parts. This format is based on the best current knowledge of structuring learning for the adult mind and has proven itself over the years.
A training management function needs to take place after an instructor and a writer have drafted a unit of instruction. The draft is circulated to the user group for review of learning objectives, technical information, references, and manner of instruction. The reviews are returned to the instructor for resolution of comments. Following the usual rewrites, all involved give written authorization by signing off on the cover sheet of the unit of instruction. The review is another way of having the review group become owners of the courses. The reviews also mean something to the trainees, who will see the supervisor’s name on the units of instruction and will know that their boss approved the content.
The format element for a unit of instruction includes the following:
• Title
• Objectives
• References
• Instructional materials and equipment
• Information sheets
• Assignment sheets
• Job sheets
• Handout sheets
• Performance evaluation.
Consider the simple structural lines of the first eight parts of a unit of instruction and their contribution to efficiency and effective learning and teaching. Everyone knows what is expected because of the objectives section. The information area gives the whys, thus making what is learned transferable to other situations. The assignment and job sheets cause the trainees to apply the information (the key to learning and retention) in a practice, no-threat situation. All handouts are prepackaged. Then there is the last section, which is kept under lock and key with limited access: performance evaluation.
PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
Evaluation is an extrapolation from the learning objectives. Face validity is achieved by matching the test item to the objective, whether it is simple (“List four parts.”) or difficult (“Under automobile accident conditions, give strategic direction to the first arriving units.”).
Performance evaluations come in whatever form is needed: pencil and paper, hands-on, simulation, interview, or a combination. Sometimes you may be tempted not to have pencil-and-paper tests. But, remember the advantages they offer. Besides the content, you can also test reading, comprehension, and the ability to follow directions. About 30 percent of our firefighters have a reading problem of one type or another, which should be of concern to you as a trainer.
There is no such occurrence as “trained.” Training is a life-spanning activity; it is never finished. The lessons learned that result from firefighters not doing as they were trained to do or not keeping up have been frequent in our history. Technical training is not all that is needed. The challenge is to establish a monitoring, tracking, and validation system that is manageable and doesn’t bury the instructors under printouts.
The overall objective of a training program should be to deliver to the emergency scene firefighters trained and competent in the skills necessary to carry out the job and who have the knowledge to evaluate and make decisions on the appropriate way to perform those skills. Training should not be about meeting quotas, nor should it be about time spent in training; it should be based on the outcomes desired.
JOHN M. BUCKMAN III is chief of the German Township (IN) Volunteer Fire Department in Evansville, Indiana, where he has served for 28 years, and a past president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC). He was instrumental in forming the IAFC’s Volunteer Chief Officers Section and is past chairman. He is secretary-treasurer of the National Fire Academy Alumni Association, is an advisory board member of Fire Engineering, and lectures extensively on fire service-related topics.
CRITICAL SKILLS ANALYSIS
What do you expect the firefighter to be able to perform as a minimum skill? This analysis can be quite extensive and involve numerous analysis techniques.
The second part of the analysis, after identification, is the development of an evaluation model. The evaluation model will provide consistency for the training officer as well as serve as a measurement device to evaluate individual and team performance.
Here are some examples of critical skills. The firefighter shall be able to
• Dress in full protective clothing, including SCBA, within two minutes.
• Take an appropriate riding position.
• Pull a preconnect and advance to the front door of a structure.
• Remove a ladder from the apparatus and place it at the base of the second-floor window.
• Locate the defibrillator and apply shock to a patient.
PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
The instructor shall describe the scenario below to the firefighter as outlined:
You are on the scene of a working structure fire and command calls you to start interior overhaul with the chainsaw:
1. Locate chainsaw on apparatus.
2. Remove from apparatus.
3. Start and warm up chainsaw.
a. Throttle must be engaged at full throttle for 30 seconds.
b. Remind students that the saw must be at full throttle before beginning the cut.
c. If the motor bogs down, you must slow your cutting speed.
4. Simulate cut by verbally describing what to do.
5. Demonstrate how to adjust slack out of the chain.
a. Demonstrate how to determine if chain is too tight.
6. Return to service.
a. Clean.
b. Refuel (the instructor shall ask what type of fuel is used).
c. Check the blade/chain used for wear.
7. Change the chain.
a. Student shall describe the implementation method to have the chain replaced with a new one or have it sharpened.
8. Demonstrate how to determine if chain is dull.
a. Student shall describe the implementation method to have the chain sharpened.
9. Describe how to complete maintenance work order if saw should be out of service.
If the student is unable to complete the scenario, the instructor shall demonstrate the correct method for the student and then the student shall perform the scenario again correctly.
