On repeated occasions in 1964 on the shuttle flight between La Guardia airport New York and National airport Washington DC, I was struggling with a course design problem. It seemed relatively simple and yet the solution (the choice of a plan, structure and strategy of instruction for the course involved) eluded me time and time again.
At the time I was assigned by the consulting company for which I worked in New York to an account in the US Forestry Service (Fire Control Division) in Washington DC. The service was concerned about the loss of life and injury to personnel that had occurred in some large forest fires in the western states of America. A directive on the subject, formulated years earlier, was re-issued for urgent attention.
The directive was crystal clear. It referred to Ten Safety Orders for strict observance when fighting forest fires. ‘These orders’, the directive ran, ‘are to be committed to memory by all personnel with fire control responsibility’. The directive to me was also unequivocal: to Washington, work with the US Forestry Service Training Department (Bert Holtby) and with the Fire Control Division (John Pierovich) and make an effective, valued (etc) course to teach the ten orders.’ The orders which had to be taught have already been listed in Chapter 1, ie:
- Keep informed on fire weather conditions and forecasts.
- Know what your fire is doing at all times.
- Base all actions on current and expected behaviour of fire.
- Have escape routes for everyone and make them known.
- Post lookouts when there is possible danger.
- Be alert, keep calm, think clearly, act decisively.
- Maintain prompt communications with your men, your boss and adjoining forces.
- Give clear instructions and be sure they are understood.
- Maintain control of your men at all times.
- Fight fire aggressively but provide for safety first.
What design to use? The question went round and round and round in my head.
The sixties were the days of ‘programmed instruction’. We had the equivalent of this book’s criteria for a good design in mind — active not passive learning, critical use of media and so on. We wanted to score well against the Emax Vmax Lmax E’max formula. This was important and challenging. The population to be trained were very varied in their attitude to ways of learning and in what each group found important. Professional fire fighters especially needed to value the method of learning; they were frontline operations men. Forest Rangers (also in the population) and volunteer fire fighters had their special preferences too. The need was clear, and at the end of training the ‘ten safety orders’ had to be known and the importance of their application in a real situation appreciated.
Referent 2 was, thus, ready made for us. (See Figure 5, p. 39.) The trainees involved had to know the ten orders — this was the ‘end goal’ in our databank. The ‘success criteria’ had to be some sort of successful performance in an end test which tested for recall of the orders. The ‘content’ in the course was the content of the ten safety orders themselves. The ‘method’, in view of the fact that training had to be decentralised, had to be the self-study method of programmed instruction; the ‘media’ was to be the printed word. The ‘constraints’ were our greatest challenge: the trainee population was a heterogeneous one, scattered throughout the American continent and Puerto Rico; the orders (worded and numbered as shown) could not be changed in any way — even to facilitate learning.
The most we had in the form of a referent 3 (an appropriate model) was our familiarity with the strategy and format of any programmed instruction text. No specific design for teaching safety orders successfully via a programmed text was known to us. With all these givens, we still had no design. Not one, at least, which would satisfy the criteria for a good design (referent 1). By now we were some one hundred, relatively costly, man-hours into the project …
The first break-through came on a Washington to New York flight after a meeting with the Fire Control Division staff. I must have studied the Ten Safety Orders 40 times or more, but decided to have one more look. In retrospect (in the terms of the paradigm given in this book) I was looking for that special bit of content — a response environment organizer.
I didn’t find it. What I did find, and wondered why I hadn’t noticed it sooner, was a ‘system’ in the orders. It was a system which made it possible to split up the orders into three subsets with safety order number 10 standing apart from the other nine as the ‘alpha and omega’ in fighting a forest fire: Fight fire aggressively but provide for safety first. It came to be called the aS2 order in the finished course. The system in the orders, with the subsets named in a way that would help eventually teach them, is given in Fig. 8.
With the splitting up of the orders into their inherent subsets (orders number 1, 2 and 3 relating to fire behaviour, orders 4, 5 and 6 to safety, and orders 7, 8 and 9 to operations control), we had a didactically useful ordering of the course content. But we still had no design …
We were by now something like three man-weeks into the project.
Finally, ‘it’ came. I was lunching with John Pierovich from the Fire Control Division. He mentioned that he had to attend an enquiry in the afternoon over a fire fighting operation in which lives had been lost and individuals injured. My intuition prompted me to ask him more. Amongst my questions was, ‘How do you run such an enquiry?’. He explained that the debriefing of the personnel who had been at the scene of the fire was done with the help of ‘fire situation maps’. For me that was the ‘click’. Some hours later we were poring over examples of such maps. A specific situation was given in schematic form: symbols representing firebreaks which were (at the time of the disaster) in the making, the type of terrain in which the fire was being fought, the wind direction and velocity, the location of spot fires which had broken out and had been started by burning debris carried in the wind, and so on. An example of such a map is shown in Fig. 9.
Figure 9 A fire situation map.
Well, you have probably guessed the rest. The content of five carefully chosen fire situation maps (some of them modified to suit the teaching need) was our response environment organizer. Combined with the schema (Fig. 8) and the notion of the alpha-omega safety order, we had a design. Some five man-weeks later the self-study text (Earl et al, 1964) and accompanying maps for analysis exercises were ready for testing in the field. From the initial reaction in the Forestry Service and Fire Control Division
I think it is correct to say that we could be satisfied with what we had made.
The type of inductive/deductive thinking which the design used to teach the ten safety orders’ can be illustrated with the help of the map given in Fig. 10, and two frames (Fig. 11) from a sequence of frames in the programmea text which related to this particular map.
Figure 10 Panel 12 from the programmed text.
In the programme, the map is called a ‘panel’. It was numbered panel 12. A ‘frame’ was the name given to a small unit of information to which the reader of a programmed text would be asked to respond. The correct response was revealed only after the reader had responded. Ten such frames (see Figure 11) were used in the programme in an analysis of the particular fire fighting situation depicted in panel 12 (see Figure 10).
Figure 11 Frames 173 and 174 from the programmed text.
The design of a sequence such as you see in Fig. 11 makes the learner do several things:
- analyse what she or he sees
- recall the relevant safety order
- evaluate whether or not an order has been complied with in a real-life situation.
It was important that the design worked this way for a heterogeneous population of learners and a critical group of learners from out of the field.
Years later, I was working in Europe, the fire fighting course-making was an interesting experience in the past, when I had a nice surprise. By pure chance I met a forest fire fighter from the USA in a bar in Amsterdam. He knew the course; he had learned from it and had liked it. We toasted, I remember, the Forestry Service, the USA, the Netherlands and the course several times. This seemed a good ending to the search for a design which started on a flight out of New York to Washington DC some four years earlier.