Too many drills start with the fun part. Somebody says “let’s pull some line” or “let’s light the prop,” and the planning stops there. If you can’t tell me what your students should be able to do when the drill is over, you aren’t running training. You’re running activity.

Start with the end

Every good lesson I’ve ever taught started with one question: what should these people be able to do when we’re done that they couldn’t do this morning?

That’s your objective. It isn’t “hose operations.” That’s a topic. An objective sounds more like this: each crew will advance a charged line to the fire room, maintain the stream and make a controlled knockdown, with the officer giving the orders. You can watch that happen. You can tell whether it happened or not.

The mistake I see most is instructors planning the evolution before they plan the outcome. They know which prop they want, how many bottles they need and when lunch is. They haven’t decided what success looks like. So when the day is over, nobody can say whether it worked. The crew got wet, the fire went out and everybody went home. That isn’t the same as learning something.

A lesson plan is a promise

I treat a lesson plan as a promise to the students and to the people who sent them. It says this time will be worth something. Writing it down forces you to think through the parts that get skipped when you plan in your head.

A plan doesn’t have to be fancy. It does have to answer a few things:

• What is the objective, in terms you can see and measure?
• What do the students need to know before they touch the hardware?
• How will you demonstrate it, and how will they practice it?
• How will you know they got it?
• What are the safety concerns, and who is watching for them?

If you can answer those five on a single page, you have a plan. If you can’t, you have a hope.

The plan also keeps you honest when the day gets busy. Live fire days get busy fast. Weather changes, a prop acts up, somebody’s gear doesn’t fit. When things start sliding, the objective is what you come back to. It tells you what you can cut and what you can’t.

Build it in steps

Adults learn by building on what they already know. That means you don’t throw a new firefighter into the hardest evolution first and hope it sticks. You start with the skill, then the skill under pressure, then the skill as part of a bigger operation.

Teach the nozzle before you teach the advance. Teach the advance before you add heat. Add heat before you add a time hack or a change in conditions. Each step should be something the student can succeed at, so the next step has something to stand on.

This is where a lot of training falls apart. The instructor knows the end goal, but skips the middle because the middle is boring. Then the evolution falls apart and everybody blames the students. That’s on us. If the crew wasn’t ready for the step, we put them there too early.

Building in steps also tells you where the problem is. If a crew can advance the line cold but falls apart under heat, you know exactly what to fix.

Check it before you call it done

The last part of the plan is the part most of us skip. How do you know it worked?

Watch the performance against the objective you wrote down. Not against your gut, not against how the last class did. If the objective said the officer gives the orders and the senior firefighter ran the whole thing, the objective wasn’t met. That’s not a failure. That’s information. It tells you what the next drill needs to be.

Then talk about it. A short, honest debrief while it’s fresh does more than an hour of lecture the next week. Ask the crew what went right, what didn’t and what they’d do differently. Then tell them what you saw. Tie it back to the objective every time.

The bottom line

Fire is a great teacher, but only when somebody decides what the lesson is. Before you light anything, before you charge a line, sit down and write out what your students should be able to do when you’re finished. Plan the steps to get them there, and check whether they did. That’s the difference between keeping people busy and making them better.

Stay safe, and train like it matters.

Eric Makowski