Honing Your Instructional Skills - 9 Steps to Improving Your Teaching!

One of the greatest adventures of my life was serving as an instructor at the USAF/US Army Fire School at Chanute AFB (Rantoul, IL) and later at the DoD Fire Academy at Goodfellow AFB (San Angelo, TX). My tour at Chanute began in April 1986 and ended in November 1992. My time at Goodfellow began in April 1994 and ended in October 1997.

As much as I enjoyed my time "on the floor" at the various fire departments at which I served, I really enjoyed my time as an instructor. Thanks to mentors such as Senior Master Sergeant Robert Trowbridge, Master Sergeant Don McGee, TSgt Jerry Blaisdell, Mr. Kenneth Medlen, and others I achieved Master Instructor status within 2 years and won numerous instructor awards to include Junior Enlisted Instructor of the Year (1988). During my time at the DoD Fire Academy, I earned two additional awards: the Goodfellow AFB Civilian Technical Training Instructor of the Year and the Air Education Training Command Civilian Instructor of the Year (1996).

More importantly, over the years I developed an approach to engage my students and bring out the best in them. As a result, my student test average was approximately 94%. Over the years, I've encountered many of my former students and found they had translated their success in Tech School to success in the field. Many of them have returned to the DoD Fire Academy to serve as instructors themselves.

For several years, I've tried to boil down my approach into a book that instructors could use to improve their instructional skills. My initial thought was to focus on Fire Service Instructors. With the advent of e-publishing, I decided to revise the book so that any instructor/teacher could use the approach.

Last week, I e-published Honing Your Instructional Skills - 9 Steps to Improving Your Teaching! on Smashwords.com. Through Smashwords, it is available at their site and at Barnes & Noble (b&n.com). Tonight, I put it up on Amazon's Kindle Store as well.

I hope instructors will take a look at this book and apply the approach to their instruction.

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Looking at the view count for my previous post, it appears that some folks may have been put off by my title of "Sacrificial Lambs." The post was about how authors create some characters merely for the purpose of killing them off to move the story along. Guess I need to work on my titles a bit!

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More snow and ice predicted for tomorrow but nothing is supposed to last. I plan to get some writing in on the prequel to the Terra-Bravo Saga this weekend (hopefully 2 chapters worth!!!) and maybe write a Hub or two.

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Stay safe!

Jeffrey

© Jeffrey M. Fortney - 2014