Last month a colleague and I delivered the new ICS 300 and 400 courses for a client. If you’ve missed them, I have some early review notes and overall thoughts posted. Nothing gets you into the curriculum like teaching it, though.
First, some credit to our course participants, who were extremely supportive in this delivery. They were patient with our occasional need to double check the instructor guide and even helped to point out some inconsistencies. While we each have about fifteen years of experience in teaching the courses, the first few times out with a new flow and format, along with new activities takes a bit of getting used to. The courses also offered some challenges that had to be overcome in our course prep and delivery.
Leading off with the good foot, both courses reflect a positive direction of change. It’s not the wholesale change that I’ve been stumping for, so expect to continue to see me championing more changes, but we are seeing positive movement in the right direction, at least with the ICS 300 course. (I still hold out that most of the content of the ICS 400 course isn’t necessary for most who take it. Time would be far better spent with grounding the concepts of ICS and supporting implementation of the aspects that are most likely to be used.)
Both courses continue a trend of scenario-based learning reinforcement, with the ability to utilize a progressive scenario threaded throughout the ICS 300 course and scenarios within the ICS 400 that help demonstrate when and how these concepts might be used. While the ICS 300 materials provide several new scenarios for use, we actually didn’t use their progressive scenarios as our client had some specific needs, requiring us to build a localized scenario for them. That said, the scenarios provided in the ICS 300 are easily adaptable to meet your needs. Just be aware of the intent of each phase of the scenario and don’t alter the overall concept.
The endeavor to ground ICS as an operational tool is emphasized in Unit 4 of the ICS 300, Implementing an Operational Process. This unit really seems to pull together the whole reason for being for ICS, especially in an extended operation, and is a good introduction to the Planning Process. This unit was very well designed and is one of the most progressive changes in the course.
Not a lot was substantially changed in the ICS 400. Aside from my earlier comment on the questionable necessity for most of the content, the course, as designed, is good enough to address what is intended, even if that intent seems misguided. Much of the course was kept the same as the previous version, but there were a few tweaks and adjustments throughout. The activity in Unit 2, the Fundamentals Review is multi-tiered and is very effective. Unit 5 provides a lot of content on EOCs which wasn’t previously included as much, as well as introducing disaster recovery topics, which at this level incident the leadership of organizations (i.e. those taking this course) need to be aware of. This is largely ‘bonus content’ which I had provided in the course off script in the past, as it wasn’t included. I’m very happy to see this as part of the course now. The capstone exercise is the same as the previous version of ICS 400 and is still very well structured and produces great outcomes for participants.
On the down side… well, there is some substantial down side. I provided a fairly detailed list (of both positives and areas for improvement) to EMI. Taking the course at face value – that is looking at what we have, not what I think it should be, most of the issues I had with this course have to do with faulty instructional design. There is no way around saying that it was done very poorly. There was significant lack of attention to detail… so many mis-spellings (spell check is a free feature included in every word processing program – FYI), inconsistencies between the Student Manual and Instructor Guide, problems with scenarios which are not part of the progressive scenario, graphics so small they are not visible for participants in the student manual, and some issues of course flow and organization.
Unit 3 in the ICS 300 course is titled Initial Actions for Unified Command. So much of the unit is built on the premise that a unified command is formed in the initial response of an incident, practically exclusive of even the possibility of a single command. This is insanely misleading and required some significant extended explanation on the part of our instructional team to temper that content.
Earlier I complemented unit 5 of the ICS 400, particularly for the additional material provided on various types of EOCs and extending the discussion into recovery. While these are great, the unit should be organized earlier in the material, especially with several earlier references to EOCs without explanation of what they are. Practically speaking, the concept of the EOC has far more actual use than any of the other concepts discussed in the course. There is also way too much material on federal-level EOCs, most of which are so far removed from incident management that most emergency managers have no interaction at all with them. I think this content should speak about EOCs in general terms.
I think Central City needs to be erased from all memory, and a new fictional jurisdiction developed. The maps for Central City, et al, keep getting recycled and are small in print, confusing in design, and clearly dated.
The final exams for both courses were very bad. They each had questions that our instructional team agreed to throw out, as they were poorly worded or ambiguous and nearly every participant got them wrong. Even most of the valid questions and answers simply aren’t suitable for short-duration training, and certainly not with a closed book exam.
In all, I provided three pages of comments back to EMI. I’m appreciative of EMI being so receptive to the feedback and candid about certain issues they had in the development of these courses. In respecting their candor, I’m not going to get into some of the points brought up, but it certainly appears as though they are disappointed with the condition in which these courses went out the door and they have a desire to improve them. Hopefully it won’t be too long until you see another update of the course materials with most of these issues addressed.
I look forward to hearing from others about their experiences with delivering these updated courses. As such a central topic to the greater public safety and emergency management community, we need to do better with teaching incident management and ICS as the primary tool we use for incident management. As a community of practice, we need to get behind this initiative and support the need for significant improvement. Of course if you aren’t familiar with my crusade on the matter, check out the series of ICS Training Sucks articles I’ve posted over the past few years.
© 2019 – Timothy Riecker, CEDP
The Contrarian Emergency Manager 