The majority believes that being a good driver is what makes him or her a good instructor of driving. It doesn’t. It is this way to think, after all, that you may have the Sunday roast of genius in your hands, but that does not make you a restaurant kitchen cook. Being a driving instructor is a career and the instruction that brings you there takes that seriously. It is actually tiring to think about watching a student, reading the road signs, foresee dangerous situations, and provide a calm oral lesson of the road signs all at the same time, and then it becomes routine. A professional career in driving instruction starts when you view details of the training modules.
Training programs on instructor training can be divided into various stages, and each of them is toothed. The initial step is hammers theory: traffic law, risk assessment, and perception of the hazard, and psychological framework of adult learning. Certainly, there is real psychology. Adults do not learn as teenagers, and a 45-year-old taking up first-time driving has baggage, anxiety and self-consciousness and years of being good at things, that the 17-year-old does not. Teachers must have mechanisms to deal with both. The second stage gets the trainees in the wheel in an entirely different role. Forget driving well. Now you must drive and at the same time, you must teach someone to drive. It is a sport of another sort.
This is what a lot of instructor training is not advertised in the brochures: how to learn to control your own reactions. A student who falls in on traffic by miscalculating a turn of the road, that occurs. A teacher who hoists the wheel in panic and screams is worse than none. In training it takes actual hours of drilling calm intervention procedures, dual control familiarisation, what some instructors refer to as silence discipline – the knowledge of when to say nothing is the best teaching you can give. One of the trainers with experience simply said: Your face is always teaching, even when your mouth is not.
Formal instructor qualifications have the lowest pass rates compared to the expectations of most candidates. In example, the ADI Part 2 driving examination in the UK requires near-perfect performance on the driving test to an above-the-standard test. Part 3 – the instructional ability test – this is the test that even the experienced candidates fail on since being able to demonstrate competence in the face of an interviewer is quite different. In this case, preparation is important. The candidates who pass through the cracks are those who will not have any peer review and reflective practice logs.
The difference between a good teacher and a truly respected one is not talent but rather the perpetual learning on their part. The road rules shift. Recent studies of the effects of cognitive load and acquiring motor skills make changes to the best practice. The demographics of the learners change. Teachers that use their qualification as a goal and not to as a stepping stone are likely to reach a plateau very quickly. The curious ones, who sometimes sit in one another, or go to CPD workshops, continue to improve. The resulting improvement in that compounding is reflected directly in the number of students passing, retaining the lesson, and, frankly, it reflects in whether instructors enjoy the job in the long-term.