Why We Are Different
This article illuminates the firearms instruction industry as it stands as of Spring 2016. The owners of Atlanta Firearms Training bring their career training to the problem of curriculum building, instructor selection and training, and performance analysis to provide a product superior to our competitors.
Overview of the Industry:
- The gun training industry is largely unregulated and has no national standards for the training of the various shooting disciplines. There is no national governing body overseeing the training, certification, or regulation of firearms trainers. Each firearms trainer is free to conduct whatever training they feel is appropriate - or profitable.
- Coaching and mentoring is about people - not things. Outstanding skills with a firearm does not necessarily translate into superior instructional capability. Most local firearms trainers are selected for their shooting skills - not their instructional / inter-personal skills.
- The use of nationally accepted approaches to curriculum design produces the best outcomes for students but is rare in this industry. Most local firearms training provides use an ad hoc approach to planning their lessons and are not trained in Instructional System Design.
- Most training providers focus on course goals other than conveying proficiency. Sport training science shows us that a basic exposure to a psychomotor skill is insufficient to convey proficiency. Most firearm classes are designed with low cost, customer convenience, and profitability in mind - not conveying a minimum proficiency.
- Many instructors are hobby instructors - when the class is over, they go home until the next class is scheduled, never analyzing the student's performance nor theirs. Professional instruction should be about continuous professional instruction improvement as experience with students is gained.
A Largely Unregulated Industry - A Paucity of Instructional Standards - What to Do?
Training standards for firearms instructor training are virtually non-existent for the average firearms trainer. I defy you to find, as of spring 2016, a book on firearms instruction techniques outside of the internal documents better firearms training providers provide their instructors. On the civilian side, the NRA Instructor certification and NRA Basic Curriculums provide an outline for training standards but do not provide the trainer with in-depth discussion of the psychology of learning. There are larger firearms training organizations who have developed sufficient standards of instructor competency with, and knowledge of learning psychology but those are relatively few and far between. Many local instructors do not have formal training in learning psychology, nor the requirements and benefits of a formal instructional system design approach to curriculum building, and instructor development.
Careful Selection of Instructors - Coaching is About Interpersonal Relationship Skills
One problem we have seen in our full time professions is the selection of personnel to serve in the instructor roles based on their expertise or performance................and not their instructional skills or personality traits. If you read our introduction you know that we as owners of Atlanta Firearms Training come from the aviation and corporate instruction field. For me as an airline instruction pilot and for Tom from corporate sales and training. The training to become FAA Certified Instructors is a stringent process with failure rates for first time applicants relatively high. Similarly to have and retain a corporate sales and training position requires formal training in adult learning and a systematic approach necessary to bring customers up to speed quickly. When we evaluate instructor candidates, our most important metric is the candidate's ability to communicate clearly, show a sensitivity to student needs, demonstrate methodical safe gun handling skills, and perhaps most importantly, have a deep enjoyment from working with people. Those are the "A"s in the acronym: KSA or Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities. One's abilities are largely innate and resistant to change. I can teach a candidate the required knowledge to be an effective instructor. I can teach them the necessary gun skills. What I cannot do is change their world view. Subsequently people skills are critically important to us - we can develop the rest. We select our instructors predominantly on their interpersonal skills, ability to teach, and for their possession of solid gun safety habits.
Lack of Defined Instructional Standards - The Use of a Disciplined Approach to Lesson Building
The industry is largely devoid of standards for teaching the various shooting disciplines. Outside the NRA, we have found NO company outside of the largest ones to have a defined lesson plan for their courses and much less a company that has used Instructional System Design design approaches to build their training. Airline instructor pilots are trained in the use of Instructional System Design approaches to build curriculums and we bring that level of discipline to our class designs. Co-Owner Brian Wilson brought his 17 years of training as an airline instructor pilot to the course development problem here at Atlanta Firearms Training:
Training for any activity should begin with a formal task analysis. The first step in a task analysis is to establish a definition of expertise or the requisite level of performance. The first step in this process is the determination of the constituent knowledge, skills, and abilities ( KSAs ) required to reach an expert level of performance. Once expertise is defined, then KSAs must be divided into their own sub-sets – ergo, the determination of various levels of KSAs leading to expert level performance. Once these are understood, then empirical standards of knowledge, skill, and abilities are established for each student performance level along with performance measures for each level.
Once this phase is completed, the learning objectives are developed, followed by sequencing of learning modules in a order so that foundational KSAs are learned, followed by the student learning advanced KSAs, which in turn become foundational KSAs for the next learning level and so on. Once this planning phase is completed, then instructional techniques best suited for learning these skills are developed which include all manners of content and skill delivery from “chalk and talk”, to the use of technology to convey information and provide feedback to the student to specific coaching and correcting techniques. An example of this would be illustrated by a goal of teaching rapid target transitions. First, the student must learn how to grip the firearm properly, next learn how to properly align the slights, next how to put that sight alignment on the proper place on the target, next how to press the trigger so as to not disturb that sight alignment through the shot, next to follow through the shot and immediately re-establish sight picture. Only when these fundamentals are mastered would you teach the student the particular skills of how to rapidly transition from one target to another target. Each of these “part-tasks” must be understood and practiced before the next task is learned – one builds upon the other. The last phase in instructional system design is evaluating the quality and effectiveness of the instruction.
To that end, standards of completion are next to be developed along with metrics of typical student performance and performance quality progression, common student errors and methods to remedy sub-standard student performance. Defined performance feedback loops and proper post training student critique is critical for student success and improvements. Once the student demonstrates basic competencies then the students should have the opportunity to consolidate these competencies in a seamless exercise where these constituent competencies are practiced in an integrated whole. The format we use for this in our advanced classes for example consists of scenarios where the student must successfully exercise previously practiced individual skills in a self defense scenario. If you take a course from Atlanta Firearms Training, you on one hand may wonder at the purpose of a particular exercise. On the other hand, you may during the course participate in what appears to be just a period of "fun" shooting. In both cases, what appears to be an isolated skill and a bit of "play" during the course are actually carefully planned activities designed to promote or consolidate skill development.
A Focus on Proficiency - There is a Minimum Round Count Necessary to Convey Proficiency.
Sports kinesiology literature shows that to master a new skill, the athlete is required to practice that skill to a total of around 5000 repetitions. A four hour firearms training course cannot possibly convey even a minimum level of proficiency in knowledge and skill. Even a full day course stretches our ability to convey minimum proficiency levels for just a few skills.
We approach this problem differently. Through the use of Instructional System Design methodology we identify a bare minimum of repetitions necessary for the student to go home with enough training to maintain that minimum level of proficiency - if they continue to practice. Potential customers will often ask us why we teach fewer skills per class than our competitors - this is why. A class with a lot of skills but low round counts per skill is not training - it is entertainment.
Our classes are designed to convey enough round counts per skill to convey a minimum level of muscle memory. Each of our exercises has a minimum performance standard defined for students. If the student does not meet that standard in the planned round count - they get extra practice - which sometimes means they don't complete the total number of exercises we planned. That is ok by us - we are concerned about student proficiency on THIS exercise before we move to more complex exercises. Most all of our advanced classes also provide an in-house developed textbook the student can refer to as they practice beyond our courses.
Continual Improvement - The Goal of Providing the Best Instruction is Never Attained
This process is not a static process. Students learn from instructors and we in turn learn from student responses to training. This clues us as to how to constantly improve our delivery. At Atlanta Firearms Training, this involves soliciting customer feedback, and instructor debriefing after each course, to determine what went right, what worked, what needs to be cut back or discarded, and how courseware needs to be changed so the next class sees an improved product. We also conduct regular instructor training to expand the capabilities of our instructors and encourage them to attend the offerings from other trainers. Tom and I usually attend one other training provider's course once a year.
The success of our business depends on student success which we define as the student enjoying the course, learning new skills and demonstrating improvement during the course, and taking home marksmanship concepts and foundational skill levels they can then use for self-improvement. This will only occur if your firearms instructor sees themselves as professional instructors first, then professional marksmen second – competent marksmen who profess high standards of instructional delivery and work consistency to improve their instructional skills. This is our training philosophy: Provide the highest quality instruction possible at a reasonable price..
Brian Wilson
Atlanta Firearms Training
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