Using Scenario-Based Teacher Training to Develop and Maintain School Emergency Response Capacity

Here’s how your campus can make the most of limited opportunities to provide emergency response training to teachers and other school administrators.
Published: January 13, 2025

Developing a school staff’s capacity to respond in an emergency is always problematic. Time for effective training is always the concern. Teachers jealously protect precious student contact and instructional time. This is understandable because education is their mission priority. And it is not as if teachers don’t already train. They train constantly… on the new math or reading program, the newest instructional technology, special education law, and a dozen and one other things directly related to education. So, how do you make the most of limited opportunities to provide emergency response training?

K-12 campuses face a wide variety of potential incidents, from a natural disaster to violence. At the onset of the incident is not the time to determine or even question what the response should be.  Anyone who has coached understands the old saying, “Practice what you want to play, because you will play what you practice.” With that as a basis, the most effective training is based on a plausible, realistic scenario and the application of your school’s plan to that situation.

Related Article: Training and Exercising Your Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management Team

All scenario-based training — whether it’s a full-scale exercise, a functional exercise or a tabletop exercise — allows for the direct application of the expected response to a potential event in a much lower stress environment. In educational terms, this is a guided practice to facilitate learning. As the understanding of your school’s expected responses deepens, the confidence of everyone involved deepens as well.

In a school, a real incident will be unexpected, confusing, and likely more than a bit chaotic. Confidence in the response by everyone is critical to mitigate the potential impact of any incident. A training and exercise program rooted in the use of scenarios will serve to develop that confidence: confidence by your staff in both the process and their ability to execute, and confidence by your students in both their teachers and the process.

Build the scenario to develop capacity and test the process.

Have a Plan and Define Your School Emergency Response Teacher Training Goals

First, never schedule any exercise without a well-developed plan and clearly established goal for the process. Always reserve time for an after-action exercise review. The review or “Lessons Learned” process is a critical element of any exercise. Exercises are a great way to test and improve a plan. However, they are a poor way to determine if you need a plan. “Let’s hold an exercise and see what happens,” is certain to annoy your staff and make it that much more difficult to get willing and engaged participation the next time.

Developing a school’s staff capacity is best done in stages. Consider a “Crawl – Walk – Run” progression. There are exercises appropriate for each stage. In the crawl or introduction stage, a tabletop exercise can be the perfect tool. A tabletop exercise simulates an emergency in a low stress environment. Participants discuss scenarios, as well as general problems and procedures in the context of response to a specific incident.

Once your staff has a basic understanding of the process to be used, a tabletop exercise should be scheduled. Remember: this is a low-pressure opportunity for your staff to apply the procedure. Consider the use of an actual event that addresses the need for your response. (Campus Safety recently published a series of these [see the bottom of this article for 11 real-world scenarios], and Idaho’s School Safety and Security Program has a number of potential incidents for use on their website: https://schoolsafety.dbs.idaho.gov/ten-minute-tabletop/.) Present the scenario and allow your staff to process through the application of the procedure to the incident. Remember to leave time to review the response.

Be Creative with Your Fire Drills to Develop Capacity

A functional exercise is a walk-through of one of your response protocols. The best-known scenario based functional exercise is the monthly fire drill and is required in most jurisdictions. Sadly, for too many schools, this drill has become perfunctory, a required and annoying interruption to instruction and a mindless race to the fence. Applying a bit of creativity to this drill can be a golden opportunity to develop capacity.

At this point, nearly everyone in a school can move a group of students from the classroom to an outdoor rally location and account for the students. The usual is easy, but the unusual is a bit more difficult. Consider, develop, and exercise plans for evacuation during those unstructured periods, immediately before and immediately after school, at passing time, during lunch, at recess and during a school assembly. The goal is still the same: get them out, get them accounted for, and get ready for the next step.

Related Article: 5 Types of School Emergency Drills and Why They Are Valuable

Consider as well, the opportunity for someone other than the principal to oversee the exercise. Often school administrators are not on campus. If an emergency happens, someone will need to step into the leadership role, and it is unlikely that the substitute will do well what they have never done. The process will be altered and will need work. Any functional exercise can be treated in the same fashion: look for opportunities beyond the conventional drill and build capacity by considering what could happen and how you will respond.

Full-scale Exercises Require a Lot of Preparation

Full-scale exercises are always scenario based, and they are exceptional learning opportunities. They are also time-, labor-, and staff-intensive. Generally, a full-scale exercise will require multiple agencies involvement and coordination and an extended planning process. This is not something you can pull off quickly or without considerable effort, nor is it something you should try to. A word of caution here: a poorly planned or executed full-scale exercise can damage your creditability and your exercise program.

Developing capacity is one thing, but maintaining capacity is entirely another. Schools are plagued by high turnover of both staff and students. Add to this itinerant staff, substitutes, volunteers and visitors, and the magnitude of the task becomes apparent. Several things can help to limit this adverse impact on schools.

The first is a district-wide common school emergency response platform. This will allow for an initial new-hire training process. Additionally, this process, once developed, can be extended to volunteers. While there are changes necessary to address facility differences, the common elements will be similar at all district schools. This same common approach applies to students transferring around the district, as well.

A robust training and exercise program should be the goal of every school. Robust does not mean time consuming. It does mean effective use of the training opportunities currently available. Make sure the mandated drills are effectively used as training opportunities. Simply scheduling a drill is not the same as planning an exercise.

Consider the addition of a “Safety Minute” to every meeting held at a school. Again, this need not be time consuming. A quick review of one of the school’s procedures or short tabletop based on a recent incident should take less than ten minutes. Beyond training (or retraining) there is a hidden benefit in this process. It will reaffirm the school’s commitment to safety and help with the development of a school-wide safety culture.

Apply These Principles to Enhance Your School Emergency Response Programs

Schools that use a bit of thought, a small amount of planning, effectively use current training opportunities and incorporate realistic scenarios can greatly enhance campus training and exercise programs. The outcome for your school will be more effective staff members in an emergency and ultimately safer students.

Resources for School Safety training and exercise development are readily available from the REMS/TA Center, from  SchoolSafety.gov and from most states school safety centers.

Check Out These Tabletop Exercises Based on Real-World Incidents


Guy Bliesner is School Safety & Security Analyst Idaho BOE. President, National Council on School Facilities. Founding Board Member: National Council of School Security Directors. Sub-committee chair for ASIS school safety standards.

NOTE: The views expressed by guest bloggers and contributors are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Campus Safety.

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