NSW Rural Fire Service safe driver program
The NSW RFS has approximately 68 000 volunteers and several hundred permanent staff. Most of these people will, at times, drive RFS vehicles. Many will drive under emergency conditions.
The driving skills required for routine operations are essentially the same as those required for normal motoring. The RFS might need to provide a licensed driver with some additional information on operating the organisation's specific equipment. This information does not amount to much.
However, emergency conditions place greater demands on the RFS driver and the motoring public.
Once you include driving to the station and returning home afterwards, rural fire driving is probably one of the riskiest things members do. To remain safe, personnel must be able to manage the risks they are exposed to. Understanding and managing personal risk is not easy. Most people need training to do this.
RFS's responsibilities
The RFS has a legal and ethical responsibility to ensure that its people are appropriately trained and equipped to do the job it is asking them to do.
In the past, the RFS has provided some driver training to many of its members. Mostly this has been in using 4WD vehicles. This training has gone some way towards preparing personnel for their role. Low-risk and emergency driver training has not featured strongly in this training. Many personnel currently respond to emergencies without special training.
RFS wishes to provide training for its people. However, it must carefully consider the approach it is to use. At present, no driver training program can demonstrate that it can reduce participants' risk of crashing.
The RFS has chosen a course that endeavours not to enhance participants' vehicle control skills. Rather, the course provides experiences that help participants develop the ability to reflect critically about their own behaviour.
Theoretical basis
The course draws heavily from various theories and constructs. They include causal attribution theory, theory relating to optimism bias and personal calibration. Also featured are risk motivation theory and theory relating to emotional intelligence, along with meta cognition, human error, and cybernetics.
The construct for the course proposes that safe driving demands the use of feeling, thinking and acting habits. These habits minimise avoidable threats to safety (the driver's and other people's). They must also compensate for the driver's errors (when he or she did not minimise the threat). The course refers to this method of driving as crash-free driving. Others may know it as low-risk driving.
A person applying this construct sees exposure to risk as being mostly within the driver's physical control. The driver must know how to achieve this control. He or she must have the emotional and intellectual habits that generate control.
Teaching challenges
How do we design formal learning experiences that can suit 68 000 people's varying needs? Can these experiences prevail over the pervasive and covert influences of their social, cultural, political, and economic environment? Can we influence their behaviour when they spend little time in an organisational environment? Can learning experiences counter the negative consequences of habituation. Can they prevent or slow the process of reverting to old habits? How do you train 68 000 people, using only lay facilitators? How do the facilitators succeed with participants who are willing to turn up for only about eight to ten hours? And these same participants are probably expecting the course to show them about driving trucks and not their minds. These are just a few of the challenges!
We might be able to see a way through many of the above challenges. We could begin by questioning the assumption that training can change behaviour. Suppose we believe, as many appear to, that training can change behaviour. We generate unrealistic expectations of what is possible in the few hours participants are at the training course.
Suppose instead, that we assume that the learning experiences participants have after training change their behaviour. Now we must shift the pedagogical focus to learning experiences in the post-training period.
However, participants work and live independent of the organisation and, up to a certain point, driving is a self-guided activity. To make this approach work, students have to become independent learners. They have to develop their knowledge and understanding of driving. They will also have to work on emotional, intellectual and psychomotor habits, on their own.
But how?
Much evidence suggests that critical thinking through the application of meta cognition can help people become their own teachers.
Vermunt (1995) proposes some requirements for independent learning behaviour. Notable is that instruction should mainly be aimed at developing self-regulated control strategies and mental learning models, in which the construction and use of knowledge are central.
Bailey (2003, p. 130) suggests, 'Developing meta cognitive ability is considered a most promising area for finding improvement in driver training methods.'
'Fundamentally, critical thinking is just exercising the general forms of thought most conducive to sorting the true from the false (van Gelder, 2001, p.1).'
Features of meta cognition and critical thinking include the ability to reflect upon and regulate one's thoughts, use executive control and process information strategically (Alexander and Murphy, 1994). Critical thinking and reflection assists in the development of expertise and enables us to correct distortions in our beliefs and errors in problem solving (Mezirow, 1990, p. 1). 'Critical reflection involves a critique of the presuppositions on which our beliefs have been built, helps people learn from the past but live in the present, with an eye to the future. Not to be critically reflective is to live in the present as a prisoner of the past' (Brookfield, 1993 p. 264).
This approach to self-directed learning is consistent with a modern curriculum that 'aims to help students ask appropriate questions and assist them to explore possible answers. Rather than providing answers to questions that someone else had decided were important' (Yaxley p. 7). Yaxley argues that, 'without effective engagement in intellectual interaction, the capacities of students to become self-directed learners will not be enhanced'.
Meta cognition and critically reflective thinking appears a promising theoretical construct. But how does one develop this skill in average drivers? To begin with, one does not call it meta cognition. The RFS program uses the metaphor of the personal coach. Students are trained to engage in dialogue with their coach - themselves.
Course structure
The course has three main parts:
PART ONE Ten face-to-face training sessions lasting a total of about six hours. Participants rehearse the skills of critical thinking to learn crash-free driving.
PART TWO Five face-to-face training sessions lasting a total of about four hours. Participants receive technical information about emergency driving. They practise applying critical thinking to emergency driving situations.
PART THREE Two minutes for 20 days. Participants use a self-coaching guide for making permanent the skills they rehearsed during training.
The program has been trialed twice and is now being further developed. It will be trialed again in December 2003 and introduced across NSW in the 2004/05.
References
Alexander, P.A. & Murphy, P.K. 1994. The research base for APA's leaner-centred psychological principles. Taking research on learning seriously: Implications for teacher education. Invited symposium at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans.
Bailey, T. 2003. Novice Driver Self-Monitoring. Conference proceedings. Developing Safer Drivers and Riders. Australian College of Road Safety, Brisbane, P. 130.
Brookfield, S.D. 1995. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, Jossey-Bass. California, San Francisco.
Goleman, D. 1996. Emotional Intelligence, Bloomsbury Publishing, London.
Goleman, D. 1999, Working with Emotional Intelligence, Bloomsbury Publishing, London.
Mezirow, J. 1990. Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood, Jossey-Bass. San Francisco, California, p.1.
Siegrist, S. (Ed.) 1999. Driver Training, Testing and Licensing: Towards Theory-based Management of Young Drivers' Injury Risk in Road Traffic, Results of European Union Project GADGET, Work Package 3. Berne, Switzerland.
van Gelder, T. 2001. How to Improve Critical Thinking Using Educational Technology, University of Melbourne, p. 1. Available from www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/reason/
Vermunt, J.D.1995. 'Process-orientated instruction in learning and in thinking strategies', European Journal of Psychology of Education, (4).
Yaxley, B.G. 1991. Developing teachers' theories of teaching: a touchstone approach, The Falmer Press, London, p. 7.