The American Red Cross has a problem. Preparedness Health & Safety Services (PHSS) courses are inconsistent. Well-intentioned instructors throughout the United States are adding to or subtracting from or otherwise changing the structure of these courses. Some instructors/ITs are completing the course requirements sooner than the recommended hours while others are taking on more participants in a class than the “sacred” 10 to 1 participant/instructor ratio. There are even some instructors/ITs in California that are stacking course sessions together to make weekend courses (like a mini Aquatic School) that attract participants as far away as Alaska and Texas who fly in for this instruction.
All these courses are different from each other and the generic outline found in Red Cross Instructor Manuals and Guides for Training Instructors. This means that someone in Georgia who takes a Lifeguarding course may have a different experience from someone in Utah or in Arizona. The American Red Cross wants its courses delivered in a consistent manner.
The answer to the Red Cross’s problem lies in understanding what exactly is consistent course delivery. Ironically, this understanding is changing along with the Red Cross. In 2011, to streamline its processes and to better manage its immense organization, the Red Cross restructured itself from a collection of some 800 to 1200 local chapters, each with its own CEO and Board of Directors, to a National Organization run from Washington DC (or Virginia). This restructuring took away any local presence of Red Cross support in favor of a strong, centralized entity. Current Red Cross PHSS policies, contained in the Manual of Administrative Policies and Procedures (MAPP), which was based on the old organization, had to be removed from circulation. Unfortunately, no one thought to rewrite them first, so Red Cross policies have had to be recalled from memory since 2011, at least for those of us on the outside looking in.
Just as the organization is left without its written policies, the issue of inconsistency in instruction comes to the forefront. A new department is created called Quality Assurance and Instructor Engagement with the mission to make PHSS courses and instruction consistent again. New factions in charge of this inconsistency problem define it in harsh, rigid ways, the way doctors define a cancer-like something to be rooted out and cut away to save what is left of the body.
I remember a time when the Red Cross had this kind of rigid policy of conformity. I can recall participants in tears on the floor of a gymnasium attempting to produce a perfect CPR tape. I can recall tribunals held because a 30-hour WSI course was finished in 25, the instructor-trainer choosing not to fill in the time with extra drills and activities. (A Health & Safety Director even once told me that I could not use a 10-lb dumbbell for Lifeguard Training because the Instructor Manual used the term “10-lb brick.”) In a bizarre attempt to ensure consistency, the Red Cross of those days, while generous and ethical in its other programs and services, was petty, pedestrian, and prescriptive in its Health & Safety operation.
Things got better in the 1990’s. By then, the Red Cross realized that it was putting so much pressure on students in CPR classes that they were too paralyzed with fear to perform skills like CPR when called upon out in the world. The Americans with Disabilities Act also had become an issue because Red Cross Instructors were not trained to modify and accommodate. This led to the brilliant concept known as “Teaching to the Standard and Testing to the Objective.” This concept not only opened the door for people with disabilities to take and succeed in Red Cross courses, but it led to the creation of critical course components and requirements which became the new basis for course consistency.
The Red Cross finally began to relax its inflexibility and empower its instructors to use guidelines to make decisions about modifications, course structure, etc.
In 1995, I was selected to be a member of a 10-person National Faculty for the Red Cross Lifeguard Training program that introduced equipment-based rescues. In preparation for my appointment, I was invited to go to National Headquarters to be trained. There, sitting in meetings with my 9 peers and high-level National Program Managers and other National Representatives, I was taught that consistency in course delivery was a matter of completing course requirements and not, for example, making the class last a certain amount of hours. We were taught how to look past inevitable differences and diversity in classes we taught so that we could measure and assess the critical components that course participants had to complete to earn certification.
I remember the specific meeting when we talked about the recommended hours and how they might fluctuate due to the many variables present in any course. This was to be expected and we were to decide consistency by making sure that all critical components of the course were taught—nothing added or subtracted—as determined by assessment guidelines. I have followed these concepts in my teaching and in mentoring other instructors/ITs since 1995 until things began to change in 2015.
The “players” have all changed at National since 1995 and there is a certain lack of understanding of what I was taught in the mid 90’s. The most frustrating part is that the QA and Instructor Engagement Department acts as though their rigid interpretation of course delivery was always the policy. I know first-hand that that is not true. As a matter of fact, the new First Aid/CPR/AED Instructor Manual released in 2016 is the first textbook with policy statements that reflect current QA & IE directives.
To understand course delivery before 2015-2016, look in an old Fundamentals of Instructor Training (FIT) textbook, if you can find a copy. The FIT book talks about applying various teaching methods, introducing flexibility in delivering subjects, handling course management under the instructor’s control (remember BASIC), and course consistency through educating and empowering instructors. And it also talks about ethics and commitments that instructors make to customers, self, task, organization, and people. The Red Cross of the 1990s did not threaten its instructors with investigation and suspension of their certification; it taught about ethics and commitment. (Sure there were Inquiry Committees to review complaints and reports of problem instructors, but remediation and reclamation of the instructor was the objective; investigation and suspension were meted out when warranted as last resorts, not first resorts and certainly not before all facts had been gathered.) I grew up believing in ethics and commitments and doing my best to follow policies, keep promises, tell the truth, be fair, and promote the success of others.
Where have these concepts gone in the new organization of the Red Cross? They seem to have gotten lost with the disappearance of MAPP and the mothballing of the FIT course. Sadly, they have been replaced in this new Red Cross organization by rigidity, conformity, and recitation. Instead of focusing on inflexibility and rote, the QA & IE group should be working on re-establishing ethics and commitment within the organization.
Consistent does not mean identical. Instruction is not recitation. This new direction by the Red Cross will not resolve the inconsistency issue except in the most artificial way while negatively impacting the quality of instruction. It will return the Red Cross to those days when “No” was the default answer to any question, when instructors knew nothing except what was on the page, when participants left frustrated from classes and afraid to use the skills they had been taught because they lacked a perfect remembrance of what they should do.
Well, at least all the courses will be uniform in length.
