How do you measure the value of a class?

[Tamara]

There are very few people in the firearms training industry that are universally respected, there being as many cliques as an '80s teen movie, but Louis Awerbuck is one that I rarely hear bad things about.

One of the few complaints I have heard is from people who seem to judge a class by the amount of actual ammo expended, and I will say that both of the classes I've taken from Louis were on the low end of the "round count" spectrum in my (admittedly limited) experience. Because of this, I found Louis's column in the October issue of S.W.A.T. Magazine interesting*, dealing as it does with his views on "Time Management in Firearms Classes".

Because of the number of twenty-pound brains here, I was wondering what other people's thoughts were on the topic?




(Industry Disclaimer: I found it interesting while I was cutting and pasting it into the html window when I was updating the website; one of several things I do for S.W.A.T.)

[Chuck Haggard]

And for paying customers, there's the rub.

Feedback that I have gotten from our troops here includes a guy who was one of the "lets go shoot and get to lunch, then clean guns and go home early" guys. After his OIS, in which he had to make a difficult shot on a guy pointing a 9mm at him, he came and looked me up and thanked me for the training. He confided "when you made us do all that stuff like scan before holstering I though it was gay. Now I get why...".

Folks getting paid can be forced to do training "right", paying customers often want edutainment. Over the past few years high round counts seem to be the marker for many if a class is good or not.

I noted at Tom Given's instructor course this past weekend that some of the most useful drills we did were low round count. His 21 drill was great fun (21 rounds used) and very good training, his adaptation of Wayne's "1-2-3" drill was a really good workout with a pistol and used 30 rounds.

[TCinVA]

Value is going to have to be judged in perspective to one's expectations and reasons for being there. As for round count, I got more useful stuff from ~ 1,000 rounds with Bob Vogel in 2 days than I got from 4,000 rounds in 4 or 5 days with some other classes. Round counts as a judge of value is a highly irrational standard and if I hear someone griping about it then my first instinct is to ignore them. If I find out it's a low round count because the instructor decided that the students were paying eight hundred bucks a head just to be graced by his presence, and that he was cutting instruction off early, taking ridiculously long lunches, and spending the majority of his time with a bunch of sack-hugging sycophants (many of whom probably weren't paying tuition to be there in the first damn place) doing little actually useful instruction for the poor naive fools who paid to be there based on the person's reputation (often pumped up by the aforementioned sycophants getting a free ride), then complaints about round count are absolutely legitimate and I'll listen very carefully.

[joshs]

It depends on the goal of the class. If the goal is to make the students shoot better after two days, then a high round count with lots of repetitions is the only way that is going to be accomplished. If the goal is to convey more information and the students are going to be expected to apply the information to their own practice, then lower round counts will be more successful.

I think both models work, as long as the instructor has clearly defined what they are trying to accomplish with their class.

[Kobalt60]

It depends on the goal of the class. If the goal is to make the students shoot better after two days, then a high round count with lots of repetitions is the only way that is going to be accomplished. If the goal is to convey more information and the students are going to be expected to apply the information to their own practice, then lower round counts will be more successful.

I think both models work, as long as the instructor has clearly defined what they are trying to accomplish with their class.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I don't think you're going to build much "muscle memory" in a one or two day class. Maybe in a week long class... But at this stage, I'm looking to learn how to train myself better from a class. If I can walk away knowing more than I did when I walked in and with a good plan for making better use of my training time then that's a success to me. If you are there as a trainer auditing someone else's course or are happy with your own methods, then walking out with a few nuggets to think about may make it worth your money.

That's true for all training btw. Unless you're just starting out at something, it's not realistic to expect every class to rock your world. I've got two classes I'm looking forward to that I'm expecting to rock my world next year, Mike Pannone's Concealed handgun course and SouthNarc's ECQC course.

[1slow]

I train in classes to pick up something of benefit that I can take home and practice until I own the material. It may be a drill, technique, concept or mindset. A class gives me something more to analyze and try to make reflexive.
I'm still working on lots and not owning much.

[GJM]

As, or more important to me than round count, is the type and handling of targets. I like steel, because of the immediate feedback (although steel should be frequently painted to show hits), and I would think twice about attending a course without some steel. For paper, I really like the PF target, because of all the different dots, squares and aiming points. However, a high round count course on just paper, where the targets are not constantly taped or changed is a complete waste of my training time and ammo.

[Tamara]

What do folks think of the way Louis does his improvised 3D targets? I found that one of the more interesting things about his classes. (That and the "final"...)

[Jay Cunningham]

I keep hearing about classes where all you do is "hose the berm" but in all the dozens of classes I've taken from dozens of different instructors I haven't seen this yet.

What I've seen:

• high tempo/high round count
• high temo/low round count
• low tempo/low round count

I've yet to take a class where I felt we "just burned through ammo". I've yet to take a class where we didn't "account for every round fired". I have taken classes that were lower round count for various reasons. Some of them were both mentally and physically fatiguing.

However, I've been through my share of classes where the round count was low because quite frankly there was a low tempo and a lot of down time. And quite frankly, there same classes were usually the ones where the instructor made some mention of "lower round count is better, higher round count means you're hosing the berm."

[jetfire]

Class value for me is determined primarily on a "knowledge received/time invested" ratio with an additional financial component. I have had major breakthroughs in my shooting come from 15 minute practice sessions with a GM friend of mine, and I've also had major breakthroughs in 3 day, high round count handgun courses. The flip side is I've gone to the 2-day lots of round sort of course and not really learned anything at all, just shot the drills and essentially paid a lot of money for a group practice session.

When I'm determining the value of class, what I'll do is take notes/etc during the class, and then 2-3 days after the class I'll go back and review my notes. That way I can have a fairly level-headed evaluation of what information I took in during the class, because the ultimate determiner of personal value is "what did I learn?" Once I've established that, the next question becomes "is what I learned something I could have learned in my own time." If yes, then I need to determine a ballpark on the time it would have taken me to learn that on my own, and whether or not paying money to learn it faster was a worthwhile investment.

Having been to lots of classes, I can say that I've only really felt that one or two of them wasn't worth my time. Usually, that's a result of incorrect expectations coming into the class, the fault for which can lie with me or the instructor. Hell, I even liked the class where the instructor cracked one of my ribs.