Lieutenant Paul D. Combs, Bryan (OH) Fire Department, has been named the 2018 Fire Engineering/International Society of Fire Service Instructors George D. Post Instructor of the Year Award. Presenting the award at the FDIC 2018 General Session on Thursday were Steve Pegram, ISFSI president, and Glenn P. Corbett, technical editor, Fire Engineering.  

“Please know this recognition doesn’t belong to me, but to everyone who has helped me along the way, and to my family, who supports my crazy dreams,” Combs noted. An instructor since 2000, Combs also instructs through his cartoons depicting timely fire service issues. They appear in Fire Engineering, FireRescue, and JEMS.

RELATED: Paul Combs Illustrations

The award incorporates the Fire Engineering Training Achievement Award previously presented at the FDIC. It is named for George D. Post, a long-time member of the ISFSI and a member of the Fire Department of New York. Post was an illustrator for fire service publications and developed instructional materials. Many consider him to be the father of visual training materials for fire service personnel.

Humpday Hangout: Visiting with ISFSI Instructor of the Year Paul Combs

“Most of us are here today because we caught the most amazing break of all--being introduced to the fire service. We found a passion in its duty, honor, service, and traditions,” Gavin Horn, director of research at the Illinois Fire Service Institute, related in the opening remarks of his keynote address at Thursday’s General Session. Gavin noted that even at the age of three, he was attracted by mechanics, which he attributed to his father’s being a great mechanic, and the motorcycle shop his parents owned in Illinois.

But, he ultimately credited Wilb’s Fix It shop in Elgin, Illinois, for arousing his passion for the fire service. This “magical place” not only enforced his inclination for mechanics, he explained, but “would let me get my hands on a project and learn the value of getting a difficult job done”; being a “craftsman”; and “knowing a little about electricity, plumbing, welding, and just about anything that can get you out of a jam.”

Wilbert Westerman, owner of Wilb’s, and his employees kept the lawns and yards in town in good shape and were great mechanics. But what really impressed Horn was that “they resolved the problem of the loss of fire protection for the town by adding a bay on the back of the shop to house a pumper and [the shop] became Pingree Gove Station #3. Five members of their community dedicated their time and energy to learn the art of fighting a fire when they weren’t turning a wrench. These guys were real life supermen. This was a place where everyday people – mechanics, parts boys, shop owners– went to work each day – until called upon to help our neighbors. They would drop their tools, wipe the grease from their hands, head to the back bay and emerge on a shiny fire truck to help those in need. Their lessons, their dedication, and their actions left an indelible mark on me. I could not ask for better role models.”

Horn attended college and earned a doctorate degree in mechanical engineering. After college, when trying to decide how he could use his skills and abilities to make a difference in the world, he said he came upon the profession called “Fire Protection Engineering and then this place called the Illinois Fire Service Institute and he became aware that his ‘passion [for the fire service] could be reinvigorated even after years.’”

His next “break” came in the form of an “opportunity at the Illinois Fire Service Institute (IFSI), which provided amazing grounds for cultivating a passion.” Horn described how during his first Fire College at IFSI, he went from class to class “amazed at what he heard, saw … and did.” He recalled company officers showing the mechanics of the hands-on techniques built on years of experience, proudly teaching the students “what was learned through blood, sweat and tears."

Horn cited a “fix it” similarity between the IFSI and Wilb’s: There was a need for action-oriented research based on the needs of the fire service, driven by the fire service, and so the fire department instructors in the state of Illinois fixed it, ensuring that research, science, and engineering were critical pillars of the education and training for firefighters for the past several decades. He recalled becoming excited about Denise Smith’s “incredible studies on the mechanics of how a firefighter’s body works and Underwriters Laboratories Fire Research Institute’s Dan Madrzykowski presenting the mechanics and science related to The Station nightclub fire at Winter Fire School.”

He found another igniter of his passion for the fire service when he went to the FDIC for the first time: “Each year, we can all be reinvigorated by the education, the camaraderie, and the entertainment we find there. There is the legacy of influence from so many of the legends who have impacted both FDIC and IFSI–so many

“One thing about training I know now that I wish I knew at the beginning of my career is the training technique ‘Deliberate Practice,’” Deputy Chief of Operations (Ret.) Ted Nee [Albuquerque (NM) Fire Department] revealed in his featured presentation at this morning’s General Session. Nee, a specialist in instruction and building instructional simulations, shared with the audience how deliberate practice can accelerate the acquisition of skills.

As a background for defining Deliberate Practice, Nee introduced a model of skill acquisition developed by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, professors at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1980s when the brothers were conducting research for the U.S. Air Force on the effectiveness of pilot training. The model, which can be applied to any skill to be mastered, consists of these levels:

• Novice. The model refers to this phase as “Know what” knowledge. You know what you were taught, you have no practical experience, you rely on training, department standard operating procedures, and the direction of your company officer.

• Then, you begin to relate what you were taught to your experiences in the field, usually after being on the job for a while and getting a couple of fires and a bunch of EMS responses under your belt.

• Competent. At this stage, you’re no longer prone to making “rookie” mistakes. You can apply what you’ve learned to solve problems posed. You may not be the fastest or most skilled, but you get the job done.

• Proficient. You can read the critical cues--building construction, fire conditions, radio reports from crews—and recognize what those cues mean and react based on that recognition. An example of operating at this level would be quickly and accurately sizing up a structure fire.

‘Engine-1 is on the scene of a medium-sized two-story apartment building. We have fire and smoke showing from the second-floor side Alpha of a middle occupancy. Engine-1 is securing a water supply and stretching a line through side Alpha. We are in the offensive strategy. Engine-1 has command. Hold the current assignments.’

• Expert.  Experts see the world through the filter of all of their prior experience. They’ve progressed from following abstract rules to skilled behavior based on concrete experience and the unconscious recognition of new situations as similar to previous ones. This is a progression from “Know what” knowledge to “Know how” knowledge.

Nee explained that it generally takes about 10 years to progress through these five steps: “With the right circumstances and training, you can progress quickly through the first three steps, but it takes time to acquire the necessary experience to reach the proficient and expert levels. It often takes as much time to go from the proficient to the expert level as it takes to get from the novice to the proficient level. Every time you learn a new skill, you start back at step one as a novice.”

Deliberate Practice

Deliberate Practice is a specific way of training that was identified by Florida State University Professor Anders Ericsson who sought to discover why some people excelled in a given field while others didn’t, Nee explained. “He discovered that the deciding factor was not innate talent or IQ, but how the subjects practiced. Ericsson and his fellow researchers found that across a wide-range of activities--whether physical, cognitive, or a combination of the two--how you practice makes all the difference.”

Nee cited the six elements of Deliberate Practice:

1. Clearly defined goals and objectives. “Every training session has to have a purpose. It isn’t just a matter of putting the time in,” noted Nee. “Ericsson refers to practice without clear goals as ‘naïve practice.’ Sitting around strumming on a guitar will not make you the next Eric Clapton.”

2. Be willing to work outside of your comfort zone. Nee added

“How did we get to a place where when things go wrong—and they will—you are damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t?” Chief Bobby Halton, education director, FDIC/editor in chief of Fire Engineering, posed this question to the audience at today’s General Session. He explained: “If we follow all the rules and things go wrong on the fireground, the elite among us will cry and those with no skin in the game will bemoan that we failed to innovate, deviate, and improvise. If we innovate, deviate, and improvise and things go wrong on the fireground, the elite among us will cry and those with no skin in the game will bemoan we didn’t follow the rules.” He labeled the situation “a zero-sum game.”

“It our fire service,” Halton declared, “and if we want to keep it, we must continue to make the rules, locally. We cannot allow some self-appointed genius with no skin in the game, some enlightened progressive bureaucrat who idolizes systems, or some politician who has never had the guts to bunker up and lay it on the line dictate to us, those with skin in the game, how to fight fires.”

All it takes to be a firefighter, Halton noted, “are thousands of hours of drill; thousands of hours of training; thousands of hours of study; thousands of hours of PT; thousands of hours of evaluating every call; thousands of hours of getting certified, qualified, and cleared so you can learn something new every day. Then, someday if you are lucky--after years of hard work and dedication and years of sweat, blood, sore muscles, bruises, bumps, and fractures--if you are like the men and women in this room, you might be worthy to be called a firefighter, a craftsman, and be recognized by your peers as a highly skilled master of the most complex craft in history.”  

Halton cited conditions today that are working to interfere with firefighters exercising their skills as craftsmen. Standards are encouraged for everything, he said. “They gave rise to centralized control incident commanders, specialization,  division of labor, and systems of compliance that are useful to a point. They have made us obsessed with records, data, reports, policies, and procedures. All of this is beneficial and useful to a point; then it becomes tyrannical.” He noted also “the misguided belief in the perfection of man through behavioral control.”

“Standardization, compliant ways of doing work, is very good for working with the risks and accounts for much of what we do, but it falls short in novel, diverse, and complex incidents, which we also do a lot,” Halton explained. “It gets messy where we deal with uncertainty, risks we don’t know or aren’t aware of, and when we deal with what we think we know or, worse, ‘what we know that ain’t so.’   

“Our fire service has reverence for complexity, randomness, and the unpredictability of where we do our work. Fires spot, winds change,

floors fail, ceilings collapse—some things are unpredictable. As such, we accept and respect the critical necessity to complete the mission in standard ways when possible or alternative ways when possible, but surrendering or doing nothing, is never an option.

“We firefighters appreciate that the complexity of our mission requires that we take a broad view, are modest in our assessments, are

respectful of uncertainty, and that we understand the difference between the times we should follow the rules and the times we should throw the rules out,” Halton continued.

Halton said that the rise of collectivism prevalent in our society has begotten a legacy of “authoritarian modernism, the belief that no one will get hurt if we follow the rules and stay to the procedures.” The elitists and those not affected by the rules they promote and enforce have been indoctrinated that “all accidents are caused by humans who are bad actors, macho cowboys, immoral, reckless, aggressive deviants and that devia

INDIANAPOLIS, FDIC International 2018, April 26, 2018 – DT Research, the leading designer and manufacturer of purpose-built computing solutions for vertical markets, today announced the DT340T, an IP65 rated Rugged Tablet with a 14-inch full-HD vivid display and dedicated high-performance NVIDIA GeForce GTX Graphic Card that supports high video processing within a wider screen. For the first time, interactive 3D training for aerospace, firefighting, military, medical, manufacturing and other environments that require highly detailed simulations are no longer restricted to an office environment.

The DT340T was also designed to meet the specific needs of law enforcement officers and first responders, who now have a versatile device that can be used in-vehicle, in the field and at the desk. For optimal in-vehicle use, DT Research has developed a unique cradle-mount for the DT340T that has a security lock, quick release and detachable keyboard, which instantly turns the device into a mobile tablet. The high power of this rugged tablet will give first responders confidence that the device will be ‘always on’ with a 180-watt hot-swappable battery pack that can run continuously for multiple days.

“Until now, 3D interactive training has been deskbound,” said Daw Tsai Sc.D., president of DT Research. “We saw the need to bring 3D simulations into the field with a large-screen portable unit that is powerful enough for 3D animations, but stays cool after hours of continuous use. At the same time, the market has not provided law enforcement officers and first responders with a single solution that spans their entire work environment from the vehicle-field-office. We looked closely at all the requirements for these users and designed a comprehensive solution that will make them more effective and productive during their entire shift – including some nice-to-have features like a dual cup holder.”

The DT340T will be showcased at FDIC 2018 – Fire Department Instructors Conference, on April 26-29, 2018 at the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. Conference attendees can come by booth 8012 to see the DT340T Rugged Tablet in action with 3D interactive software.

The DT301T is a large screen, lightweight and high powered MIL-STD tablet with a built-in dedicated graphic card and detachable keyboard, which can also be locked for added security. The tablet has been purpose-built for 3D animations, law enforcement and first responders in a variety of environments including:  firefighter training, military defense training, pilot simulation, medical imaging, and manufacturing automation training.

The DT340T includes the following features and capabilities:

·         Brilliant 14-inch Sunlight-readable Display – 14-inch Full-HD LED-backlight screen with capacitive touch. Display resolution is 1920 x 1080.

·         Dedicated High Performance Graphic Card – Pre-integrated NVIDIA GeForceâ GTX 1050 graphic card with 4GB VRAM is optional.

·         High Performance CPU and Windows