By Homer Robertson
For Firefighter Nation

Our goal for each Quick Drills column is to give the company officer resources to create a fast training session for their crew, or to give the volunteer training officer an idea for a night drill when it’s been a busy week and preparing the night’s training took a backseat to other priorities.

Many of the fire and rescue operations we perform are complex processes, and they’re almost all performed during emergency situations. As a result, we don’t have the time to read a step-by-step manual to walk us through the process. Our actions must come from memory, from skills we develop studying and repeating hands-on training until it becomes second nature.

Quick Drills is geared toward giving you bites, not the entire meal, because most of the subjects we discuss could fill several pages if we tried to cover everything, and with the fire service being the way it is, there’s just a lot of different ways to do the same job. Hopefully these small points generate interest and create questions that lead to more training, because the more we know, the more we need to know. More information is coming out about the way adults learn and retain information. Most experts agree that adults learn best by receiving new information in small segments and then retain it by performing an action—all of which fits perfectly into training in the fire station.

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Photo credit: Keith Cullom