This post was initially a response to one of the FFN folks asking how to do the job as a new safety officer. After writing the post, I thought it deserved it's own spotlight to help folks learn not only how to get folks to focus on safety but also how to teach. This should help any FD Training Officer out with a complete lesson plan resource for a couple of safety related training topics. Enjoy. CBz

Do you think a Safety Topic such as how to chock your engine might have prevented this?

Many times, it's all about awareness to make safety the focus.

So you are a new training officer with the fire department. Now what? How do you change a departments culture in regard to safety if you are new, younger than the other FF's, or your department has never really focused on safety. You have to remember that you are dealing with adult learners, which means a myriad of learning abilities and disabilities coupled with your department's culture, time on the job and a ton of other things that influence your departments viewpoint and focus on safety. Does your department have a culture that takes safety seriously? If they don't, then maybe, just maybe, if you follow my lead here, use and abuse / rip-off my stuff for your department from this post, you might make a difference in how your folks look at safety. At least I sure hope so!

CBz Recommended Guidelines to Manipulate FF's to Think Safety

Rule Number 1: Don't micromanage your folks just because you are the safety officer. People should be expected to know their job and you should only get involved if someone does something that can or did cause an issue. Always remember that there is a chain of command and you will always be in a better position letting somebody with a higher pay grade be the heavy. You need to foster a relationship with your troops where they know that you are all about protecting and teaching them new things that are interesting and timely. But how does one teach to ensure that this can occur?

Rule Number 2: Medic Pay... that's how I remember it but there are basically four steps in teaching. You don't break these rules or the order, it's just how it's been done since WWII when these teaching styles and rules were first invented. Our country had to train thousands of men, and quickly, so methodology was developed to make this happen. Here's the four steps:

1. Motivate
2. Prepare
3. Apply
4. Evaluate

Motivate: In order for adult learners to learn new concepts or consider changing existing perspectives or prejudices, you have to reach the student through engaging their imagination and senses. If they are not interested in what you have to offer, then you've lost them. You want people to come back for more, anticipating what you will come up with next, making the learning experience fun. But you have to grab their attention first to motivate them to want to watch, listen, perform and use in their routine activities.

Example 1: Vehicle Fire Safety, Apparatus Placement and Water Supply - Watch this video provided by Chief Mike France and think about showing this video to your firefighters, breaking them up into groups, asking each group to identify what kinds of safety problems they see and how they would prevent it.

After watching this video, can you see how some good discussion can result because you shared this video and got folks talking about... safety. That's the goal here right?

Prepare: In order for learners to learn something, you have to slowly and methodically prepare them for the lesson, class, evolution, whatever. Take for example the top photograph showing black light glowing or urine, feces, and other human body excretions in a bathroom. There's your motivation to understand that you can't always see things that can hurt you... or gross you out.

Apply or Application: This is where you find a way to bring the lesson into full focus and understanding by the firefighter. You can call this the lesson plan, instructors notes or whatever but it is the part where you are going to actually teach something.

Example 2: In order to prepare your students for learning, using the dirty toilet photo above as the motivation tool, and understanding that for this drill you are going to need some props to enable the student to be prepared to learn new information, by again, using as many senses as you can. Here's what you need:

Blacklight to illuminate the biomaterials as seen in the bathroom or, in this case everywhere an individual touches themselves because you have a secret teaching tool for this drill and it's called Clue Spray or Tagger Spray. In conjunction with a black light, anything that this invisible spray touches will glow under a blacklight. And by now, most folks are familiar with RAVE parties... or Elvis Blacklight Posters.

So now that you are thinking about psychedelic images, and hopefully by now, I've got you sucked into reading about where I'm going with this which is the point. You want to engage the learner to take on new information and again, I'm pretty sure that I've pegged your interest to see where I am going with this. 

Assuming that you have these two necessary materials, e.g. blacklight and Tagger Spray, all you have to do is spray a piece of paper that has some writing on it, possibly a safety bulletin with pictures and big print.

You don't need folks to handle it much, but you have to ensure that every student in the classroom passes the paper between themselves and the other students. You want them to handle whatever it is that you are passing around because the dirty little secret and key point to this safety briefing is that once they have passed the paper on, EVERYWHERE THEY TOUCH WILL BE HIGHLIGHTED WITH NEON BLACKLIGHT COLORS!

People will touch their face, neck, and other places and things including their crotch... Once everyone has handled the secretively "contaminated" piece of paper or object, turn off all the lights in the room and use the blacklight as a "monitor" to scan the student for signs of contamination. Trust me on this one, at least one guy is going to scratch his crotch. It happens... And it reinforces the lesson that things that you cannot see can get you. So can not chalking the tires on a fully involved vehicle on a grade, not catching your own water or parking too close to a burning vehicle, but that's a different training topic for Safety next month...

The above video shows how the use of the blacklight and Tagger Spray is used to teach exposure to pesticides, and even though one goes through a decontamination process, not everything is cleaned off. The best way to teach this is to use the FT technique explained in the video. You don't need to purchase a "kit" but instead, understand the concept and buy your own blacklight and spray.

Evaluation: This is the final step in teaching which using the example of a decon drill, have folks do the actual decontamination process and use the blacklight to see if they did a good job or not. This is the final step to affirm that what you wanted to get across to the students was accomplished.

Here's an actual lesson plan on video for instructors using blacklight for teaching pesticide exposure risks. 

I hope this helps anyone reading this post to think outside of the box, effectively communicating with your troops and preventing injury or worse to your FF's. One final thought... you can't research your lesson plan enough so live and teach the concept that failure to prepare is preparing for failure, so be prepared!

You are only limited by your own imagination.

- CBz