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I feel that lifelong learning is an important part of continual improvement as an employee and emergency responder. I realized that I had to adjust my approach to lifelong learning over the course of the five years of attending graduate school on a part-time basis. By refining my approach and better focusing my efforts, I gradually became more efficient at increasing my knowledge while balancing my family/education/work time commitments.
I started my graduate school journey in January 2011 after my first year of marriage. Over the next five years, I found it necessary to change my approach to studying and learning in both an academic and work environment. Each graduate course required different methods, some of which entailed a significant amount of reading and reflection and then presentation or discussion in a weekly format. Other courses required collaboration and study groups to meet weekly and present our findings or the status of our ongoing research. Each course, project, and paper required me to analyze the best study methods, and then work to schedule my calendar to fit with family and work obligations. Additionally, the courses often required me to build a specialized task completion matrix detailing delivery dates for course readings, summaries and milestones. I was able to use some of my project management experience from work and apply that to my graduate school coursework. One of the benefits of working full time while attending school is that I had significant real-world experience and ongoing challenges that could be used in the classroom for examples and class discussions. Each semester challenged me to continually refine my learning style and to focus on how I could most effectively learn.
One of the new methods of learning I enjoyed at the Bush School was the use of case studies. I took that approach and introduced it to our training program at Disaster City. I was able to bring in my experiences of learning by using case studies at the Bush School and modified that method for urban search and rescue students. I worked to develop a case studies program for our Passenger Rail Rescue course. Students were assigned a different case study each night during the course and were required to be prepared the next morning to discuss what they had learned from the article. I would lead the students in a facilitated discussion in which they would share their
takeaways from the initial response, prioritization of actions, and operational plan, and then would critically analyze what improvements could have been made. The discussions were a balance of soliciting opinions and encouraging responses. They also involved a careful understanding that each student’s fire department could have slightly different response protocols; what might work for a large fire department would be inconceivable for a smaller fire department. The case studies that I currently use are the 1993 Sunset Limited Derailment in Alabama, the 2004 Madrid Spain Train Bombings, the 2008 Chatsworth Derailment in California, the 2009 Washington D.C. Metro Derailment, and the 2013 Spuyten Duyvil Derailment in New York.
At the Bush School, I learned the importance for students to understand that the responsibility for in-depth analysis of case study lessons learned in a case study approach is that reflective learning shifted to my students. My approach to lifelong learning has also carried over into a new course that I am researching and developing. I was approached by a major transit agency on the East Coast to begin developing a week-long course on Transportation Tunnel Rescue. Taking lessons learned at the Bush School, I conducted a literature review and was able to determine a considerable lack of training, peer-reviewed articles, and standardized curriculum on this topic. In the last few months, I have worked to develop terminal and enabling objectives for the proposed course and have begun the process of correlating the available information, while simultaneously identifying gaps in the knowledge base. I will follow with the second phase of creating new information that fills remaining gaps in the knowledge base.
I continue to embrace new learning methods and have begun to work with developing blended online courses and computer-based courses for US&R professionals.
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