Twenty Tips for Being a Bad Instructor

A field guide for instructors who want to make sure their students walk out worse off than they walked in.

There are a lot of ways to teach a class badly. Most bad instructors arrive at their methods by accident, but the truly committed bad instructor follows a system. The following tips, gathered from observation across the medical, tactical, and emergency response training world, will help any instructor reliably fail their students.

Make the class about you

1. Tell war stories. The students are there to learn about you, not the course material. The more time spent on stories from your own career, the less time available for the actual curriculum. Bonus points if the stories have only a tangential connection to what you're supposed to be teaching.

2. Focus on your resume, not the material. Open every section by reminding students of your credentials, your years of service, and the agencies you have worked with. Students benefit more from understanding the depth of your training history than from the actual material in front of them. The list of courses you have taken can serve as a kind of curriculum on its own.

3. Discuss your political or social views or personal life. This makes you real to the students. The training room is a great place to share where you stand on current events and what is going on with your family. Anyone uncomfortable with this can either pretend to agree or sit quietly until you move on.

4. Get defensive when challenged. You are the expert. The students need to know this. If a student asks a question that exposes a gap in your knowledge or contradicts something you said, the correct response is to push back hard rather than engage. Admitting uncertainty undermines the carefully constructed authority you have spent the entire class building.

5. Teach outside your scope. Experience in a skill doesn't matter if you established your resume early. Once you have your certifications, freelance into adjacent topics, contradict the official curriculum when you think you know better, and hold forth on subjects outside what you were actually trained to teach. Students will assume you know what you are talking about because you are the one standing at the front of the room.

Build a slide deck that does the teaching for you

6. Make sure the slides are just words. Pictures and diagrams reinforce learning, which is not what you're going for. Slides should contain the entire curriculum in dense text blocks. The slides should be the curriculum.

7. Read the slides verbatim. The students may not be able to read them on their own. Read each slide out loud, word for word, and trust that this constitutes teaching. For maximum effect, turn your back to the room and read the slides off the projection screen behind you.

8. Don't bother explaining why. Tell students what to do, but never tell them why it works. The reasoning behind a skill is probably not on the test anyway. Students who understand why something works are also students who can adapt it, question it, and remember it long-term, none of which serves your goal of getting through the deck on time.

Make sure no one feels comfortable enough to learn

9. Use big medical words at every opportunity. This way the students know you are smart. Whenever you could use a plain word that everyone in the room understands, choose the technical term instead and do not define it. If a student looks confused, this is a sign your instruction is working.

10. Speak in a monotone, quiet voice. This way the students have to be quiet to hear you. It also reduces the chance that anyone will retain the material, since a quiet monotone is the human voice's natural sleeping pill.

11. Single students out and pick on them. Especially good targets are students whose jobs or military branches you find amusing. The class is more entertaining for you when you can lightly humiliate one or two attendees. The other students will be grateful it isn't them.

Keep students from actually practicing

12. Skip hands-on practice. Hands-on takes time and money. Equipment costs money to buy, takes time to set up, and slows the class down because students need to actually do the skills repeatedly. A good lecture can cover the same ground in a fraction of the time, and students who watch a demonstration will retain just as much as students who practiced it twenty times. Probably.

13. Use the same training equipment for years without replacing it. Training equipment is expensive. If you bought a tourniquet trainer in 2018, there is no reason to replace it now. Tourniquet design has not changed in any way that matters. Students do not need to practice on the equipment they will actually use in the field. They need to practice on whatever you have, ideally in a quantity that requires students to share and watch each other rather than each completing every repetition.

14. Make scenarios unwinnable. Scenario-based training is most useful when there is no path to success. Students who cannot win a scenario are students you can debrief by pointing out their failures, which lets you flex on your superior judgment. If there is a way to win a scenario, it defeats your flex. Build scenarios so that whatever the students do, they were going to lose anyway.

15. Create training scars. Design hands-on exercises so that students develop habits they will carry into the field. The most efficient training scars come from convenience-driven exercise design. Set up scenarios with equipment configurations that would never exist in the real world. Have students stage gear in places they would never actually find it. Use time pressure that runs in the opposite direction of how an actual incident unfolds. Students will practice the wrong thing repeatedly, embed it in muscle memory, and reproduce it faithfully when it matters. Bonus points if the wrong habit looks correct in a controlled setting and only fails under stress.

Treat your knowledge as permanent

16. What you learned ten years ago must still be right. The field does not change. There is no reason to track curriculum updates, protocol changes, or new evidence. The same principle applies to hands-on currency. It has been fifteen years since you touched a patient in real life, and this does not matter because you are always right. Hands-on practice is for instructors who lack confidence in their original training. The fact that you have not done this work in over a decade only deepens the wisdom you bring to the classroom.

17. Invent your own way of doing everything. Manufacturer designs and lessons learned by countless others do not mean as much as your new Gucci technique. The fact that the established method has been tested across millions of applications is less important than the fact that you came up with something different, possibly while showering. Teach your version. Tell students it is better. They will believe you because you are the instructor.

Avoid genuine engagement

18. Don't encourage group participation. Group discussion takes time. Time spent on participation is time you could have spent finishing early. Plow through the material with no breaks for questions and the class will thank you for letting them out before lunch.

19. Don't debrief. After a practical exercise, the most efficient debrief is no debrief at all. The students are just there for the fun part anyway. Specific feedback on what each group did well, what they struggled with, and what they should adjust takes time. Skipping the debrief entirely gets you to the next section faster, and students rarely retain feedback they never received.

Don't prepare

20. Skip preparation in two directions. Reviewing the slides ahead of time would mean you arrive at the room knowing what you're about to teach, which removes the element of surprise. Both yours and your students'. While you're at it, don't keep resources on hand to contact other subject matter experts. If a student asks a question you can't answer, the question probably won't be on the test anyway. Telling a student "I don't know, but I can find out" suggests a level of intellectual humility that undermines your credibility as the smartest person in the room.

These tips, taken together, will produce a class that students remember for the wrong reasons, an instructor who feels effective without being effective, and a training organization that loses its reputation one bad class at a time.

At Penn Tactical Solutions, we see this list as a checklist of what not to do. Every instructor we work with has been asked to take it seriously. We screen for it in hiring. We watch for it in the classroom. And when we find it, we correct it.

Teaching well is harder than teaching badly. The first requires preparation, attention, humility, and a real commitment to whether the students in front of you actually leave the room knowing more than when they arrived. The second requires only that you show up. We hold our team to the first standard.

If you are looking for a training partner for your organization or community, the easiest way to evaluate any provider, including us, is to ask whether their instructors do any of the twenty things on the list above. The answer should be no.