BY PHIL JOSE
You’ve decided to become a fire service instructor and embark on a journey to learn the craft of teaching alongside that of firefighting. Recognize that even though you are an excellent firefighter, being good or even great at something is not a predictor of success teaching that same thing. In sports, it’s well known that the best players don’t always make the best coaches. If you want to be a great coach or a great teacher, then you need to accept that teaching is a different skill from doing. Dedicate yourself to developing the following skills to prepare for your first classroom session. This is only the beginning of the wonderful journey ahead of you as a fire service instructor—get started today!
- Teaching the Fire Service: A Question of Engagement
- Phil Jose: Reading Smoke and the Transfer of Command Process
- In Their Own Words: Phil Jose and Dennis LeGear
- The Fire Service Instructor and the Individual Learner
Lesson 1: You Teach, Not PowerPoint®!
Your students are adults who can read. Teaching demands more of you than just reading the slides. Draw on your own experience as a student. You have been in that class, haven’t you? Remember your firsthand experience in a classroom where the instructor simply read the slides. He probably stood more than halfway toward the back of the room, had his back to the students, and likely did not establish or maintain eye contact or interaction with the students. Recall that experience—was it effective? Enjoyable? Educational? Valuable to your skill and career development? No? Then do better. Be better. PowerPoint® does not teach—you teach! Become a teacher!
Lesson 2: Be Prepared!
Collect copies of the lesson plan and supporting documents and read them. Understand the “why” behind the lesson plan and behind the application. Take notes to relate the information to your own experience. Teachers know the value an applicable story, told at the right time in the lesson, can add to understanding. Keeping track of your experience relative to the lesson plan will prove valuable.
Review the lesson plan thoroughly. Work your way through the presentation, reading the slides and the instructor notes and tracking where you can go back to the source material. If possible, speak to the one who wrote or approved the curriculum. Watch someone teach the course and take notes on each slide. Sit down and discuss the class with them after. As you learn, take notes on the questions the lesson created in your mind or that you had for the instructor and his answers. Likely, your students will have the same questions. Find the answers and incorporate them into your lesson plan notes. There is always more to learn, especially if you are going to teach a topic effectively.
Example 1
Consider the lesson plan for a new standard operating guideline (SOG) within your department, which you should read and reread until you can recall it almost verbatim. Do the same with any references cited in the SOG, including other SOGs, training guides, books, and articles from fire service magazines. Read them all to understand how they apply and do not apply to the lesson plan you are learning.
Identify conflicts between the lesson plan, the supporting documents, and your understanding of the subject. Trust that if conflicts among these rise in your mind, they will also arise in your students’ minds. Seek out the resolution and develop your understanding so you can address questions as they arise.
Having an answer is important but, as a novice instructor, be prepared to admit you do not know the answer to a question. When this occurs, promise to get back to the student asking the question. Follow through, get an answer, and share it with the student and class. You build credibility by demonstrating your commitment to providing the right answer later. You lose credibility if you shoot from the hip, especially if you are wrong.
Lesson 3: Practice; Lesson 4: Practice; Lesson 5: Practice
Practice your delivery. Teaching is a skill. Practice improves the skill, and focused practice improves the skill faster. Go through the presentation using the slides and slide notes. Your initial practice sessions can be a mental exercise as you think through what you will say. Do not hesitate too long before you start talking your way through the lesson. While talking, you should be standing up and practicing speaking out to your virtual “students.” Ask the questions in your lesson and give space for students to answer. Talking your way through the lesson helps you build the mental models necessary for effective delivery in front of a live group of students.
Lesson 6: Timing and Flow
Working through the lesson helps you understand the timing and flow of each slide relative to the entire lesson plan. Timing and flow are best perfected through practice using the lesson plan as a guide for the time spent on each section. While you are talking your way through the slides, take notes on the messaging that you think will be effective. Regularly update the instructor notes version of the lesson plan while ensuring you continue to meet the course objectives.
While practicing your delivery and talking through the slides, insert the questions and ideas you have developed earlier in your preparation. Evaluate which will engage your audience in the material. It is likely some students already have some expertise in the lesson topic. Questions offer your students the opportunity to think about the application of the new material to their operational world. Leveraging student engagement and experience adds value to a class and helps the ideas stick in their memory. Giving them the opportunity to help reach the course objectives will also increase their buy-in to the topic.
Example 2
If we continue with the example of teaching a new SOG, it is highly likely that there are reasons for developing the new SOG. Knowing the supporting information, you are in a great position to recognize which students in your room can add value. Identify and seek to engage those students directly with your questions. While practicing, pose your questions aloud. When they sound good to you, check them against the course objectives and include them in your lesson plan instructor notes. A good practice is to put questions in a different color in the lesson plan to highlight them during practice. You add extra value when the questions you develop tie more than one slide together, connect the current slide topic to a previous one, or anticipate future slides.
Lesson 7: Focus on the Hard Stuff
During practice, identify sections of the lesson plan that are easier and more difficult—for example, an operational change that is controversial. Spend extra time working through challenging sections. It may help to self-evaluate why the section is challenging. When deciding to practice a difficult section of the lesson, begin two or three slides before, and carry your practice past the problem section. Transitioning in and out of a problem section builds a good mental model representing how the section fits in the overall lesson. This type of practice also builds a reminder for you that a challenging section is coming. This is an opportunity to focus on your delivery of the difficult message or the challenging section. You can apply this technique to sections of a lesson that you find particularly valuable or that have an emotional component—for example, discussing a firefighter or civilian fatality. By focusing some of your practice on these sections, your overall performance as the teacher will improve.
Lesson 8: The Test Teach
Now you are ready to test teach the class to a couple of “students” who can also function as mentors. You will need a few people you trust to act as students and who will provide good feedback after the test teach. Try to replicate the classroom logistics you plan to use including the projector, the lighting, and your positioning in the classroom. Present the entire class, including breaks, handouts, and so forth to your students; they, in turn, should look at the class from a student’s perspective. They should engage when you ask questions, refer to the material in handouts when you indicate they should, and generally try to be the audience you expect when you deliver the class. Once you have finished, they should provide feedback on your performance as a teacher. Their feedback will be invaluable! Use it for a few additional practice sessions before your first teaching day.
The First Day!
The first day is here! You are well-prepared and have read, developed, and practiced your delivery! Now, enjoy teaching the class. You will make mistakes. Accept this going in, and do not dwell on them. Just keep moving through the lesson. It is more important that you have developed your knowledge base, you understand the lesson, you practiced the delivery, you preplanned questions to ask the audience, and you can present with confidence. Your confidence will carry the class a long way even through the mistakes you might make.
Lesson 9: Self-Reflection
The last critical step for developing as an instructor is engaging in some self-reflection after every class and occasionally having a mentor in the room watching you. Mentoring is a particularly strong improvement tool when you are starting on a new curriculum. Having someone in the room to monitor your performance and provide productive and supportive feedback immediately after the class ends is the mark of someone who wants to be better. Mentoring and feedback effectively improve and develop your skills faster. It may seem like the road to improvement is challenging, but anything worthwhile is. Being a great teacher in an area you love is priceless.
Remember: The slide does not teach! You teach. Be prepared, and practice. Learn your timing and flow. Focus some energy on the hard stuff but enjoy your first day! Teaching is a skill. Skills can be developed. Coaching matters. Practice matters. The students matter. The message matters. Welcome to the world of the fire service instructor. We’ve been waiting for you.
PHIL JOSE retired as a deputy chief from the Seattle (WA) Fire Department after 30 years of service. He chaired the Standard Operating Guidelines and Post-Incident Analysis committees. Jose has been an FDIC International instructor since 2004. He was named Chief of the Year in 2014 and was a co-recipient of the FDIC International 2008 Tom Brennan Training Achievement Award. He is the co-author of Fire Engineering’s Air Management for the Fire Service (2008), its Train the Trainer (2015) video; the “Bread and Butter” SCBA video (2012); and the new book, Instructor 1 for Fire and Emergency Services (Fire Engineering).
