You can have the best lesson plan in the building and still lose the class in the first ten minutes. The plan tells you what to teach. The people in front of you tell you how. If you aren’t reading them, you’re just talking.

The lesson plan is a map, not the road

A good lesson plan matters. It keeps you on track, it covers the objectives and it makes sure nothing important gets skipped. I’m not telling anybody to wing it.

But the plan was written before you met these people. It doesn’t know that half the crew came in off a busy shift. It doesn’t know that two of them have done this evolution a hundred times and three of them have never touched it. It doesn’t know the room went quiet the second you mentioned the live burn.

The mistake I see most is an instructor who delivers the plan exactly as written no matter what is happening in the room. They hit every slide. They finish on time. And a lot of the class walked out with nothing. The objective was never to get through the material. The objective was for the students to learn it.

What to watch for

Reading a class isn’t some special gift. It’s paying attention on purpose. Before you start and the whole way through, keep your eyes on the people and not just your notes. A few things tell you a lot:

• Eyes and posture. Leaning in and watching means you have them. Looking at the floor, the phone or the clock means you don’t.
• The questions they ask. Basic questions in an advanced class tell you the foundation isn’t there. No questions at all usually means they’re lost or checked out, not that they understood everything.
• How they move on the drill ground. Hesitation, watching each other before acting, or one person doing all the work tells you more than any written test.
• What they don’t say. The quiet student who keeps glancing at the prop before a burn may be telling you something important.

None of that shows up on a roster. You only see it if you’re looking.

Adjust without lowering the standard

Once you’ve read the room, you have to do something with it. That part takes some nerve, because it means stepping off the script.

If the foundation is weak, back up and build it before you move forward. Pushing advanced material on top of a shaky base doesn’t save time. It just moves the failure to the fireground. If you have a few experienced people who are bored, put them to work. Let them demonstrate, coach a partner or take the harder role in the evolution. If the energy is gone, change the format. Get them out of the chairs and put their hands on the equipment.

What you don’t do is lower the standard to fit the room. Adjusting how you teach is good instruction. Adjusting what “competent” means is not. The fire doesn’t care how tired the class was. Everybody still has to meet the same objective before they leave. You’re just changing the road they take to get there.

Live fire raises the stakes

Reading the class matters in every setting, but it matters most when there’s real fire involved. In a classroom, missing a confused student costs you a quiz score. On a live-fire evolution, it can cost a lot more.

Before a burn, I want to know who is confident, who is nervous and who is overconfident. Each of those people needs something different from me. The nervous one may need a little more walk-through and a reminder of how the evolution will run. The overconfident one may need a tighter leash and a clear reminder of what the rules are. Both of them need an instructor who noticed.

During the evolution, keep reading. Watch breathing, watch body position, watch how they handle the line. Heat and stress change people. The student who looked fine at the briefing might not look fine ten minutes into the burn. If you’re only watching the fire, you’re missing half the job.

The bottom line

Teaching isn’t delivering information. It’s making sure the people in front of you can actually do the job when it counts. You can’t do that if you aren’t paying attention to them. Read the class before you start, keep reading it the whole way through, and be willing to change your approach without ever lowering the standard. The plan gets you started. The students tell you where to go next.

Stay safe, and train like it matters.

Eric Makowski