Fire Service Instructor: Principles and Practice, Second Edition

Chapter 4: The Learning Process

Chief Concepts

 As a fire service instructor, you are a leader and have a responsibility to teach information, to hone skills, and to promote positive values and motivation in your students.  According to Edward L. Thorndike, there are six laws of learning: readiness, exercise, effect, primacy, recency, and intensity.  Of the five senses, seeing (e.g., a visual demonstration of a skill) is generally the most effective means of learning, followed by hearing (e.g., listening to a lecture), smelling (e.g., smelling smoke), touching (e.g., handling fire equipment), and tasting (rarely used in training fire fighters).  Two schools of thought have developed to explain how behavior evolves: behaviorist and cognitive. • According to the behaviorist perspective, learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior that arises from experience. • According to the cognitive perspective, learning is an intellectual process in which experience contributes to relatively permanent changes in the way individuals mentally represent their environment.  Learning that is intended to create or improve professional behavior is based on performance, rather than on content. Such competency-based learning is usually tied to skills or hands-on training.  Mandating learning often results in a lack of motivation in classroom activities and a poor attitude toward the learning process in general, which present quite a challenge to the fire service  To assist your students in becoming effective learners, you can share study skills that enhance what they learn during classroom and personal study time. Study tips can be viewed in three categories: classroom, personal study, and test preparation.  Abraham Maslow determined that certain needs should be satisfied to enable a person to move forward toward self-actualization: • Physiological needs • Safety, security, and order • Social needs and affection • Esteem and status • Self-actualization  Benjamin Bloom and his research team identified three types of learning domains: • Cognitive domain (knowledge) • Psychomotor domain (physical use of knowledge) • Affective domain (attitudes, emotions, or values)  Each and every adult learner has a distinct and consistently preferred way of perceiving, organizing, and retaining information.

1© 2014 Jones & Bartlett Learning & National Fire Protection Association  The ability to learn is not solely dependent on use of the student’s preferred learning style. Most adult learners will adapt their learning styles and use nonpreferred learning styles if necessary.  Researchers focused on learning styles are divided into two distinct camps: those emphasizing the cognitive learning domain and those highlighting other learning-related factors, such as motivation and personal preferences.  Once you have identified students with some type of learning disability, then you need to adjust your teaching as necessary to ensure their learning. There are many ways to help students in your class who are struggling to learn.  Most often, disruptive students have other underlying issues that cause them to seek out attention in a negative way.