NCO earns TRADOC top honor

By KRIS GONZALEZ, Fort Jackson LeaderApril 15, 2010

NCO earns TRADOC top honor
(Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

FORT JACKSON, SC -- For the first time in Fort Jackson's history, a noncommissioned officer from the U.S. Army Soldier Support Institute has been named TRADOC NCO Instructor of the Year.

Sgt. 1st Class Jonathon Blue, chief instructor for the retention department of SSI's Recruiting and Retention School, was recently awarded the title for Fiscal Year 2009.

"It brings me great honor to be recognized as the TRADOC (NCO) Instructor of the Year, especially knowing that there are many great instructors currently serving throughout the Army," Blue said.

"He really is the epitome of a great instructor," said Kathleen Collier, SSI's staff and faculty chief. Collier was also head of the SSI evaluation team that declared Blue SSI's Instructor of the Fourth Quarter last year, later as SSI's Instructor of the Year and then helped prepare him to compete at the TRADOC level.

"He's got a presence about him," Collier said. "He strives for perfection. He wants to make sure the students understand what he's talking about, what he's trying to train them."

It's a teaching philosophy Collier and her colleagues helped Blue convey in a 20-minute video, which he was required to submit to TRADOC, demonstrating his skills as an instructor in a classroom environment.

"He likes to use a lot of interaction," Collier said. "He gets the students involved. When he's teaching, it's not just him up there talking. He makes the students look things up.

He'll ask them questions to make them think about things they've experienced and what they were thinking about when they signed up for the Army."

Although he teaches many courses and classes for RRS, Blue said his primary job is training Soldiers to become Army career counselors. He said his main goal is to teach, coach and mentor eight other instructors to train their own students to be successful at retaining "our No. 1 resource in the Army -- Soldiers."

Blue, who enlisted in the Army in 1993 as a light track vehicle mechanic, deployed to Iraq in 2003 and 2005 for 12 months each while assigned to the 4th Infantry Division based at Fort Hood, Texas.

After his second deployment, he came to Fort Jackson to attend the U.S. Army Career Counselor Course.

By 2007, he was an instructor.

In July 2009, he was handpicked as chief instructor of the retention department, due to his work ethic and technical and tactical skills, said Sgt. Maj. Richard Jones, director of the Retention Department at RRS, who was the first to nominate Blue for SSI's quarterly competition last year.

"Sgt. 1st Class Blue is a great role model for all instructors," Jones said. "He is capable of not only gaining respect from students, but he also has the ability to break material down to the lowest level and relate it to Soldiers."

And teaching the retention curriculum is not the easiest of tasks, both Jones and Blue expressed.

"We are different than other schools who have their lessons prepared by writers or developers located elsewhere," Blue said. "We write and develop our own lessons based off of input from (seasoned counselors in) our career field. They tell us what new counselors need to know and we prepare the lesson plan. After it's developed, we turn around and teach it in the next course."

And while the retention instructors are required to keep a certain amount of lesson plans updated for each course within the RRS, what sets these instructors apart is that they are not permitted to use hard copies of their lesson plans to teach their courses, Jones said.

They must memorize their class openings, closings, training material and respective regulations.

To keep up with the continually changing curriculum, and to address the need for creating a realistic, combat-focused learning experience, Blue said he uses his own experiences and lessons learned, from both garrison and while deployed, as teaching tools in the classroom.

"Students are receptive to real-world scenarios and experiences," he said. "Students want to hear how what they learn today may be something they will experience tomorrow."

Blue will travel to Newport News, Va. where he will be recognized by TRADOC Commanding Gen. Martin Dempsey on May 18 during the opening ceremony of the Army Training and Education Summit.