Every instructor walks off the training ground someday. The question is whether the program walks off with you or keeps running without you. If nobody behind you can do what you do, you haven’t finished the job.

Good firefighters don’t automatically make good instructors

I’ve been in this service a long time, and one of the most common mistakes I see is handing someone a lesson plan because they’re good on the fireground. Being skilled and being able to teach that skill are two different things. A great nozzle operator might have no idea how to explain why they do what they do. They just do it.

Teaching means breaking a skill down, seeing where a student is going wrong and fixing it without making them feel small. It means managing a class, keeping people safe and holding a standard when everyone is tired. Those are learned skills. If we don’t teach them on purpose, new instructors learn them by trial and error, and their students pay for the errors.

Certification courses help, but a classroom only gets you started. The real development happens next to an experienced instructor, on real evolutions, with real students.

Bring them along in steps

You don’t throw a new instructor into a live burn as the lead and hope for the best. You build them up the same way we build up recruits: crawl, walk, run. Here’s the progression I like to use:

• Have them shadow you and watch how you brief, run and debrief an evolution.
• Give them one piece to own, like a skill station or a single part of the briefing.
• Let them run a full evolution while you stand right there and stay quiet unless safety requires otherwise.
• Debrief them the same way you’d debrief a crew: what went well, what didn’t, what they’ll change next time.
• Hand them the lead and step back to a support role.

The hardest part of that list for most of us is staying quiet. When you see a new instructor fumble an explanation, the urge is to jump in and fix it. Unless someone is about to get hurt, let them work through it. Talk about it afterward, away from the students. Nobody builds confidence in front of a class while someone keeps taking the class away from them.

Teach the why, not just the what

A new instructor who only knows your steps will fall apart the first time something doesn’t go according to plan. One who understands why each step is there can adapt.

So explain your thinking. Why did you stop that evolution? Why did you position the safety line there? Why did you change the order of the drill when you saw how the class was doing? Those decisions are invisible to someone watching from the outside. If you don’t say them out loud, your replacement never learns them.

That goes double for live fire. Fuel loads, fire behavior, crew rotation, when to call it. These are judgment calls built on experience, and the only way to pass that judgment along is to talk through it, evolution after evolution, until the new instructor starts making the same calls before you do.

Check your ego at the gate

Some instructors don’t develop the next generation because, deep down, they like being the one everybody needs. I understand the feeling. It’s good to be the person people look to. But a program that depends on one person is a fragile program. Someone gets sick, retires or moves on, and the training stops.

The best instructors I’ve ever worked around were always pushing someone else forward. They gave away the good stations. They let the new people take the credit. They measured their success by how well things ran when they weren’t there. That’s the standard I try to hold myself to.

And understand that a new instructor will do some things differently than you do. That’s fine as long as the standard holds. Sometimes their way is better. Be open to learning from the people you’re teaching.

The bottom line

If you’re an instructor, part of your job is making yourself less necessary. Pick someone with the right attitude, bring them along one step at a time, explain your reasoning and give them room to make mistakes in a safe setting. Then hand them the lead. The measure of your career isn’t how many classes you taught. It’s how many good instructors are still teaching after you’re gone.

Stay safe, and train like it matters.

Eric Makowski