When is a skill "mastered"?

[boulderjohn]

We often talk about new divers being task loaded/task overloaded by the environment, their equipment, and their developing skillset. What then is the incentive for an instructor, often given limited pool/confined water time, take a group of people with varying comfort levels, varying athletic ability, varying swimming ability, varying focus ability, to put them in a situation totally new, with equipment they are not familiar with, and they have to pay attention, learn, and assimilate a skillset that their life depends on, all while managing body position and buoyancy?

I am not saying it can't be done. And, I am certainly not saying it shouldn't be done. But there is not a whole lot of incentive for an instructor to institute neutral buoyancy as the overarching skill at the beginning with which they will introduce/teach all other skills.

-Z

This is the typical response. You have never seen this done, so you use your imagination to guess what it must be like. You discount what I say, even though I have many years of experience teaching both ways and can make a comparison based on experience.

I don't know how others do it, and I don't want to repeat a long description I have posted before, but in my case, after some initial work to get them comfortable, I taught the initial skills to students who were prone, with the fins and maybe their lower legs touching the floor, spread behind them. Horizontal trim is important. They had enough air in the BCDs to allow them to rise and fall near the floor as they breathed. It was like fin pivot, but not far from the floor--never up to 45°. They were far, far, far more comfortable and at ease than the students were when I still taught kneeling.

From that beginning we transitioned until the skills were done mid water.

 

[scubadada]

Yes, in the US. Not in France or Italy. And quite distinct from the UK early training.

And this training was different at the same time?

 

[tursiops]

And this training was different at the same time?

Similar, I'm told, especially in the lack of focus on neutral buoyancy during training and ignoring any issues associated with walking/crawling on or grabbing the bottom.
Perhaps @Edward3c or @Angelo Farina can tell us about the absense of neutral-buoyant training NOT in the US.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

We often talk about new divers being task loaded/task overloaded by the environment, their equipment, and their developing skillset. What then is the incentive for an instructor, often given limited pool/confined water time, take a group of people with varying comfort levels, varying athletic ability, varying swimming ability, varying focus ability, to put them in a situation totally new, with equipment they are not familiar with, and they have to pay attention, learn, and assimilate a skillset that their life depends on, all while managing body position and buoyancy?

I am not saying it can't be done. And, I am certainly not saying it shouldn't be done. But there is not a whole lot of incentive for an instructor to institute neutral buoyancy as the overarching skill at the beginning with which they will introduce/teach all other skills.

Whether it is perception or reality, I believe most instructors lean towards having their students on the bottom as both being safer and facilitating their students' ability to observe, absorb, and learn the skills required to obtain certification.

-Z

Because it actually saves time. When I taught at a shop, we had 2 3-hour sessions. When I was teaching on the knees, it was tough to complete all skills in those 6 hours. CW5 was basically skipped by the other instructors at the shop (yes, a violation I know). When I made the switch, I needed 5 of those 6 hours, leaving me an hour to introduce "games" where the students continued to work on their dive skills.

The reason this happens is as follows. First, as I describe in the blog posts on how I teach, there is overhead. And that overhead makes instructors skeptical. But you get that time back and more as your students are continuously working on their buoyancy as they wait their turn to perform skills. So when there are skills requiring neutral buoyancy, it goes far easier and faster.

The difference is dramatic in the final results. But don't ask my students about this as they are biased. Ask the experienced divers who dive with my students immediately after certification.

People have to try. I would recommend finding some instructors who teach fully neutrally buoyant and trimmed start to finish and ask if you can observe their classes.

 

[Zef]

This is the typical response. You have never seen this done, so you use your imagination to guess what it must be like. You discount what I say, even though I have many years of experience teaching both ways and can make a comparison based on experience.

I have done nothing of the sort...neither discounted what you said, or used my imagination to make a guess as to what "it" must be like due to never having seen this done. I think rather you are making assumptions and overstating things about me.

I have held you in quite high respect since I began participating on ScubaBoard due to the educated and balanced perspective you often present. But statements like the one I quoted above, leaves me questioning whether you truly bring a balanced prespective or whether that is only true when folks tacitly agree with and don't stray from the sentiment you hold.

Perhaps those who teach their students in truly neutrally buoyant position, without fins and legs touching the bottom, would frown on your method.

And, personally, If I were an instructor, instead of lowly divemaster, I too would adopt a neutrally buoyant approach to teaching diving...but still, that does not make up for the fact that instructors in general have little incentive to push past their perception that neutral buoyancy equals less control from a class management standpoint and/or student learning management. Which is what I was conveying in my previous post.

-Z

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

the fact that instructors in general have little incentive to push past their perception that neutral buoyancy equals less control from a class management standpoint and/or student learning management. Which is what I was conveying in my previous post.

That's fair. And a problem that I have no idea how to address.

 

[agilis]

Mastery of a skill is different from mere competence. Even a highly competent person may not have reached the mastery level, which can be defined as knowing something well enough to teach it.

 

[boulderjohn]

Mastery of a skill is different from mere competence. Even a highly competent person may not have reached the mastery level, which can be defined as knowing something well enough to teach it.

You are applying the definition of a word as you use it to the definition used by others in a different setting. In this case, the use of the word mastery in scuba instruction is derived from an instructional process called mastery education. Google will give you multiple explanations for this. The process was chiefly developed by Dr. Benjamin Bloom.

In that system, mastery is defined as demonstrating a standard of performance at a specific level of development. That level is called a benchmark level. When a student has shown mastery at a benchmark level, then the student can move on and later show mastery at another benchmark level. An analogy would be baseball. A 12 year old can show mastery of fielding at the little league level and then move on to demonstrate mastery at more advanced levels.

The key difference between this and other systems of education is time. In traditional education, students are taught for a specific time and then measured to see how close they came to a specific standard, at which point they are given a score relative to that standard. In mastery education, students are taught (with continual assessment) for however long it takes them to meet that benchmark level of performance.

In teaching this, we used to say that in traditional education, time is the standard and learning is the variable. In mastery education, learning is the standard and time is the variable.

Almost all scuba instruction is done this way now. This is very much PADI's definition for mastery. A student achieving mastery for buoyancy in the OW class looks very different from a student achieving mastery for buoyancy in a trimix class.

 

[boulderjohn]

I have done nothing of the sort...neither discounted what you said, or used my imagination to make a guess as to what "it" must be like due to never having seen this done. I think rather you are making assumptions and overstating things about me.

I have held you in quite high respect since I began participating on ScubaBoard due to the educated and balanced perspective you often present. But statements like the one I quoted above, leaves me questioning whether you truly bring a balanced prespective or whether that is only true when folks tacitly agree with and don't stray from the sentiment you hold.

Perhaps those who teach their students in truly neutrally buoyant position, without fins and legs touching the bottom, would frown on your method.

And, personally, If I were an instructor, instead of lowly divemaster, I too would adopt a neutrally buoyant approach to teaching diving...but still, that does not make up for the fact that instructors in general have little incentive to push past their perception that neutral buoyancy equals less control from a class management standpoint and/or student learning management. Which is what I was conveying in my previous post.

-Z

I apologize. I have had a very frustrating decade and a half listening to people telling me why what I did cannot be done.

 

[grantmac]

I don’t consider Master Diver even worth a discussion.

I was more referring to the recommendation to teach and test OW skills while neutrally buoyant. It was definitely not the case when I got certified 15 years ago and I am now thinking about my kids going to get certified in the coming couple of years. I would prefer them to learn the “right” way from the beginning, if possible.

GUE Rec1 (or whatever it's about to be called) teaches everything neutral from the get go.