WHAT’S WRONG WITH SAFETY TRAINING . . . AND HOW TO FIX IT

I like to use the 90-90-90 rule. This rule holds that the course will be judged effective when 90 percent of the participants are able to demonstrate 90 percent of the skills with 90 percent accuracy. And as good as this rule is, it’s a stretch for a lot of courses, but it’s still a nice target, and when we are doing safety training, I really think it allows us to set the bar a little higher than we might ordinarily.

Okay, so now you’ve decided what you want the participants to do, and how well they have to do it, you must establish some way to evaluate how “good” is “good enough”, and for that we need clear measurement parameters. Defining measurement parameters can be a lot trickier than it appears at first blush.

Let’s say you’re putting together a course in Right to Know and you’ve decided that you want the participants to be able to understand their specific legal rights. It’s impossible to observe a person’s “understanding” and so you will need to write an objective that identifies behaviors that you can observe but that also demonstrate an understanding of the content. Using our action verbs you might write something like:

RULE 2: FOLLOW A SIMPLE COURSE DESIGN MODEL
If people think safety training are boring then they haven’t talked to a lot of Instructional Designers. These clods will bury you in hours of jargon and complex models largely developed by academics for academics, but if you listen closely and are able to stay awake long enough, you just might find that some of the things they are telling you are worthwhile.

I’ve taught many Train-the-Trainer workshops where the participants follow a simplified course development model that seems to work pretty well for subject matter experts who are pressed into doing training. The model I teach in these sessions is simple (“it” refers to a skill you are trying to teach):

1. Introduce it. Adults need to understand why they should learn the skill you are trying to teach, and believe that learning this skill has something meaningful and valuable in it for them. When you introduce a skill quickly and convincingly let the audience know the WIFM (“what’s in it for me?”

2. Define it. When you define the skill, be specific about exactly what the skill is, and—where appropriate—is not.

3. Explain it. Once you have defined the skill, you need to explain the context in which the person will use the skill, and provide the participants with criteria so they can judge whether or not they are correctly applying the skill. Far too often skills are defined in such vague terms that the participants what they are expected to learn.

4. Illustrate it. Using examples, visual aids, or other means, illustrate what the skill looks like when being properly applied. Here is where drawing on your experience and telling war-stories can help you to get the point across. You can also share how you came to understand a concept or tricks that you used while learning a skill.

5. Demonstrate it. Demonstrating a skill is crucial, both in building a skill and maintaining your credibility. Demonstrating a skill allows the participant to see how the skill is correctly performed and can ask questions to clarify things that they may not understand.

6. Allow people to practice it. Once people have seen the skill, they are ready to try it themselves. While they practice the skill you should be providing guidance and coaching so that people are able to refine the newly acquired skill in the safety of a supervised situation.

7. Evaluate it. If you wrote a good objective, evaluating the participant’s progress should be very easy, all you need do is to compare the participant’s demonstration of the skill with the criteria for success you established in the objective.

Remember: not everyone will be successful the first time they try to demonstrate the skill. As a successful safety instructor, you must repeat the demonstration and practice steps until you are satisfied that the individual is able to correctly demonstrate the skill.

By following these seven steps for each of your topics you should be able to effectively build the skills that you are supposed to be teaching, of course designing a course around these simple steps is a lot harder to do than it first appears.