Teaching CPR means more than imparting lifesaving skills. It’s about engaging your students and inspiring them to use these skills when it matters most. Plus, when your students are your coworkers, it’s also about building camaraderie, teamwork, and your reputation as an authority on-staff.
But that’s easier said than done, isn’t it? How do you keep your students’ attention in an age when attention spans are shorter than ever?
A successful CPR class starts with you and your passion for teaching CPR. Your students need to understand why learning CPR skills matters — not just to meet certification requirements your employer has set, but for the sake of being able to save people they know and care about in an emergency.
Plus, the more interactive and personal you can make the training, the easier it will be to keep your students’ attention, and the more likely they will be to retain what they’ve learned.
To help you be the best trainer you can be for your staff, here are seven tips from one of ProTrainings’ own paramedics and CPR instructors for improving and holding student attention in CPR classes!
1. Emphasize the Gravity
Consider the internal culture of your organization. Are staff members only there to check a box and get their required CPR certification? Or do they feel a sense of duty and pride in having their life-saving skills up-to-date?
- If your company’s culture or your students seem to prioritize learning life-saving skills you likely don’t need to reinforce the gravity of the situation. They get it.
- If your company’s culture or your students seem removed from the reality of CPR situations, then it’s likely worthwhile to spend extra time illustrating the fact that such situations are truly life and death.
To give your team members a good sense of this grim reality, it’s important to challenge their belief that they won’t need to apply the skills they’re about to learn.
CPR is a matter of life or death, and students need to understand this before class begins.
Remind them that they aren’t just learning a simple skill — they’re learning how to save the lives of people around them. When students understand how important CPR training is, they have much greater incentive to give the class their full attention.
2. Make It Relevant
Another part of communicating the importance of CPR training is helping students understand how that training directly impacts their lives. The more relevant they perceive the information they’re learning to be, the more likely they are to care about paying attention and remembering it later.
Emphasize that emergencies can happen to anyone, anywhere, and that when it happens to someone they know, they could be the only person available and capable of helping.
The best way to illustrate this point is by sharing real-world examples of:
- Members of your company’s staff having to use CPR — either at work or off duty.
- Examples of when a competitor’s organization had to use CPR to save someone.
- Stories of unexpected emergencies, such as when healthy athletes have required CPR rescue.
- Your own personal stories of using CPR to save someone in your life.
Depending on how likely a life-saving emergency is to occur within your organization, you will need to tailor your examples accordingly.
Your students could be the difference
between life and death.
Come prepared with statistics and stories that your students can relate to, such as:
- Emergencies requiring CPR can — and often do — happen to seemingly healthy people. The AHA estimates that 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 80,000 young athletes die from sudden cardiac arrest every year.
- Considering that around 74% of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests take place at home, there’s a good chance they could need to perform CPR in their own household. Have them think about that for a moment.
- According to the Red Cross, “every minute that passes without CPR reduces the likelihood of survival by approximately 7-10%,” which makes a timely rescue all the more important.
- According to the Red Cross, “studies have reported survival rates of approximately 10% to 12% when bystander CPR is administered, compared to 2% to 8% without it.”
Share these statistics with your students at the beginning of your class. At the end of class, ask your students to repeat the statistics to you to reinforce their learning and understanding of the importance of their new skills.
3. Know Your Audience
While the basic skills you teach will remain the same for most students (aside from modifications for disabilities or other special circumstances), it’s important to tailor the class to each unique group of students based on their role within your organization, the demographics of the people they serve, the environment they work in, and their experience levels.
For instance, if you’re teaching beginners, you’ll need to spend more time teaching and reinforcing the basic steps and techniques, including:
- Why we do CPR
- How chest compressions help to circulate oxygen
- Why we do chest compressions at a rate of 100 – 120 bpm to replicate a natural heart beat as closely as possible
- The purpose and importance of rescue breaths
- The importance of overcoming mindset issues that prevent people from performing CPR.
If you have experienced medical professionals, on the other hand, you can likely shorten the time spent on reviewing basic skills and focus more on discussing updates to ILCOR guidelines or other things that may have changed since their last CPR class, including:
- Early initiation of CPR by lay rescuers due to the low risk of harm if the victim is not in cardiac arrest.
- Use of physiologic indicators, such as arterial blood pressure, to monitor and optimize CPR quality and efficacy.
- The importance of IV drug administration over intraosseous (IO) administration.
- The prioritization of oxygenation for cardiac arrest in pregnant women.
By tailoring each class to the specific group of students present, you’ll be able to provide the type of instruction those students need most, giving them the best chance of saving lives when the time comes.
4. Ask Open-Ended Questions
While teaching, don’t just feed your students all the answers. Ask them questions to gauge their comprehension and encourage them to engage critically with the material. However, try to limit the number of questions that only require a one- or two-word answer. Instead, ask open-ended questions that require a deeper, lengthier response.
Some examples might include:
- Asking students to summarize what you’ve just taught in their own words.
- Asking for a real-world example of what you’ve discussed.
- Describing an emergency scenario and asking students how they would respond.
- Presenting an example of what not to do and asking students to identify the problem.
Open-ended questions help break up the monotony of listening to a lecture and challenge students to produce complex thoughts of their own based on the class material. Plus, they help you determine whether the students have truly grasped what you’re teaching, or if you need to go into more depth on a particular topic.
5. Let Curiosity Lead the Way
One of the best ways to get students to pay attention and remember what they’ve learned is to pique their curiosity and invite further questions. Even if the questions are tangential to the lesson, students are more likely to remember answers to questions they’ve asked compared to passively listening to lecture.
Letting their curiosity take the lead — so long as it doesn’t derail the class — allows you to provide more comprehensive and relevant instruction while actively engaging the students’ interest.
The best catalyst to learning is curiosity.
Additionally, it’s important to ensure your students feel comfortable asking questions. Due to social anxiety, fear of sounding stupid in front of their colleagues, and past negative experiences in learning situations, some of your students may hold back from asking important questions, which only impedes their learning.
Here are a few ways to help break the ice to make your students feel comfortable asking questions:
- Establish the expectation for questions. At the beginning of class, let them know, “I fully expect you to ask questions. If you have one, just raise your hand and I’ll pause to answer it.”
- Give them historical social proof that it’s OK – and encouraged – to ask questions during class. Bring a list of your favorite questions past students have asked and share them by saying, “I once had someone ask me a great question during a CPR class…”
- Give them index cards or sticky notes at the beginning of class for them to write down questions anonymously. Leave an envelope or box at the front of the room for students to drop their questions during breaks.
6. Get Them Moving
Having the students sit passively in their chairs the whole time isn’t ideal for learning, especially if the class is several hours long. Break up your instruction so that students are getting up and moving around every 20-30 minutes.
- Give them bathroom and water breaks.
- Pause for lunch.
- Have them form discussion groups.
- Instruct them to practice with the manikins on the floor.
- Run them through practice scenarios.
Without regular breaks like these, your students are much more likely to zone out or be distracted by their discomfort. Keep them moving throughout the class so they’ll stay alert and engaged. There will be less risk of anyone falling asleep, and they’ll also feel more involved in the subject matter.
7. Be the Authority
Even adults can be disruptive or unwilling to participate in class. Sometimes this is because they’ve taken similar classes before or don’t care about CPR beyond the certification requirement, while other times it may be due to external factors in their personal life.
Whatever the cause, however, you are the authority. Your duty is to your students and their learning, not to entertain someone who is stealing everyone’s focus.
Don’t be afraid to ask a student to step outside if they are preventing you from teaching or preventing other students from paying attention. If this is new or uncomfortable for you, try this technique:
- Pause. When a student is being disruptive, pause. Stop your lecture and focus on the person who is disrupting the group. Oftentimes, disruptive students don’t realize others can hear them or the impact they’re having on the class.
- Assume the best. Rather than assuming the person is being inconsiderate intentionally, assume they are asking for help, asking a good question, or – if they are using their phone – that they have an important matter to attend to.
- Offer Help. Depending on the student’s behavior, you can invite the student to ask you their question, ask if anything you’ve been teaching is unclear, or ask if the student needs to step outside to take care of whatever may be distracting them, making it clear that it’s OK to do so so the rest of the class can focus on the material.
While this may make the disruptive person angry, it may also cause them — as in the case of one physician’s assistant who was asked to leave a CPR course because he was obstructing the lesson — to reflect and apologize for their behavior.
Generally, adults require less strict, disciplinary-style teaching than young students do. But sometimes being firm is a necessary part of your job as an instructor to maintain order and keep the lesson moving at the right pace.
Bonus Tip: Share Your Passion
Keeping students engaged in CPR classes isn’t always easy, but it is essential to ensure they retain the necessary knowledge and skills and can apply them in an emergency.
Above all, share your passion for teaching CPR, and encourage your students to own the responsibility — and opportunity — to step in when someone’s life is on the line. Do your best to impress upon your students not just what you are teaching but why it matters. People are much more likely to remember what they’ve learned if they feel it is important. So
For more tips on teaching CPR and first aid, follow us on LinkedIn.