Survey Results: Student Preparedness & Satisfaction Following Pool/Confined Water

[RJP]

Bull Pucky.

Instructors (whether you call them coaches, mentors or idiots) CAN provide significant help to one learning how to dive (or any other activity). Beano -- you are beginning to sound like "The Music Man" pleading with "the band" to "Think men, Think."

Every top notch athlete has a coach to help them improve. Do you really think those coaches are parasites on the Michael Jordans and Tiger Woods of the world?

The job of the instructor, in scuba diving, is to assist the student in the learning process which will mean providing both verbal and non-verbal aids. Too much verbal assistance is counter-productive but so is too little -- and unless the student understands the non-verbal instruction, it may well be useless unless explained to the student verbally.

Where's the damn "Love" button?

 

[rhwestfall]

I don't care how much/little time was spent in the pool (long class & I was quite confident on skills), and one class in full exposure protection (inclusive of hoods and gloves), there was no way I was "prepared" for 42 degree water for my check-out dives....... Not sure anyone could be....

 

[knotical]

I used to live in Hawaii. A lot of those "self taught" folks may not have formal training, however they didn't just go by gear, hop in the water, and figure it out on their own. They learned from their friends how to do things.

Actually, that's pretty much what some of us did. Three of us got an Aqualung and took turns. I actually read the little booklet that came with it. The other two, not so much.

 

[beanojones]

Every top notch athlete has a coach to help them improve. Do you really think those coaches are parasites on the Michael Jordans and Tiger Woods of the world?

Coaches are necessarily parasitic on the existence of those seeking training. (Parasitic does not mean a parasite. Adjectives =/ nouns.)

If we thought of what we did as coaching, then that would be a good start. But then we have to accept the fact that there is no game to which the practices are heading. There is a 'proof' of a sort in wins and losses and making the cut in competitive sports.

There ain't that in diving.

It's one of the reasons people can have such counterprodcutive notions about what an instructor should do, because in the end there is no competitive aspect weeded out those using ineffective, and inefficient methods.

What RJP is attempting to do with this survey is to try and get some sort of notion of what works, at least on some metrics, from the student's perspective.

Instructors (whether you call them coaches, mentors or idiots) CAN provide significant help to one learning how to dive (or any other activity).

The job of the instructor, in scuba diving, is to assist the student in the learning process which will mean providing both verbal and non-verbal aids. Too much verbal assistance is counter-productive but so is too little -- and unless the student understands the non-verbal instruction, it may well be useless unless explained to the student verbally.

Ok so let's accept that range of statements as fact (except the italicized), and work with them a bit. If there is productive instruction, then there must also counterproductive instrcution. Instruction either has an effect, or it does not. And if it does have an effect, then it can work for or against the student.

We do have to accept that instrcutors are simply not necessary, because there are too many counter-examples for this not to be true.

So instructors can be counterproductive, and they are not necessary in the logical sense of the word.

Since we instrcutors are working from a basis of not necessary, and we can be counterproductive, then we need to be careful about what we are doing, and pay attention to the results, and not hold tight to what we want to do.

You have to remember that just like you, I started out teaching the Open Water class the same way every else did. Endless yammering, and kneeling students, and forcing their "skills" to be rote copying of what I demo and briefed. Becuse as you know, that's what we all got trained to do in the PADI DM,IDC and IE. And then we see what that results in. In other words, what BoulderJohn noted where DSDs in the pool for the first time were more comfortable swimming around the pool than OW students who had finished CW 1-5.

Mnay SB instrcutors have taken it part of the way, in the neutral bouyancy skill direction. I walked down that same path, independently, but just did not stop there. I came to realize some time ago that just about every tick in the average instructors behavior set is counterproductive. No one should ever stand in the pool with fins on and their mask off, yammering. Because what happens when they take that to the ocean in any kind of condtions? And if you remember, that god awful ocean awareness was even in the GUE OW course. This level of sloppiness is unforgivable in any course, and it shows that even instructors who consider themselves the best, are still stuck thinking about the course from their perspective, and not the students perspective.

So once I started modeling proper ocean behavior from beginning to end with the airway never unprotected ,mask on on, regulator in, (which I kind of had to, anyway, because training directly in the ocean as much as requires it for safety reasons), there was this enormous leap in students competence right from the beginning. And a huge savings in time, because the entire time in the water was practice of some basic aspect of diving. You know, just like we realized about having the skills done neutrally buoyant right from the jump.

Any time we see a huge leap in student competence we have to be willing to let go of what we as instructor think, or want. Let go of whatever we, as instructors, are holding precious about our own importance. These ingrained instructor behaviors are simply standing in the students way of going diving, and competence. We have to be humble enough to learn from this.

And that's where the italicized portion becomes false.

#1. We are in love with what we do, because we are human. I have met many many instructors proud of their briefs and demos. But that's turning the point of the class on its head. Who cares if the instructor can do the skill, or even explain the skill? It only matters that the student can do the skills.

#2. Diving is not verbal, and doing briefs and demos are not necessary (because the entire instrcutor role itself is not necessary, thus any subsection of it is also not necessary). Who cares if the instrcutor can do a brief/demo? It only matters that the student can do the skills.

That means the minute we open out mouth to gift our students with our wisdom, or to set up some exaggerated demo that does not reflect anything in actual diving we are remembering our needs from #1, and forgetting #2. If we can improve the divers enjoyment, and efficency, then, sure, throw out a few words here and there once we hit the water.

But most "Skills" occur naturally to divers in an efficiently laid out course. First learned, best learned and all that. Divers can be taught how to remove and replace their BCD and weight belt during the first introduction to both things standing on land. There is no further briefing or demo necessary for doing underwater and surface weight belt R&R, and underwater and surface Scuba Unit R&R in a well-laid out course. They all follow naturally from the rationale of the role of the weigh belt and the BCD, as explained and practiced on land.

If an instrcutor has to demo or brief those skills in the water, then they are not properly introducing them from the beginning of the course.

Is keeping a course this tightly tied together in timing and logical progression easy? No. But that's where the expertise (and hey the ego, in my case) in comes in. My courses result in competence in ridiculously short times, as do the courses of people who have followed along and stolen my methods.

We talked about this back in I2I (when I was still allowed to post there). Wu Wei should be the goal of an instructor. A student should be largely unaware of having done any skills. My job to make sure they do them, but there's no reason for them to know that they were doing a ***"SKILL"****.

 

[descent]

Those ideas are not currently orthodox. I had to look twice to see if your username was "Martin Luther".

 

[boulderjohn]

Since we instrcutors are working from a basis of not necessary, and we can be counterproductive, then we need to be careful about what we are doing, and pay attention to the results, and not hold tight to what we want to do.

The logical fallacy in that statement is that you omit the possibility that instruction can be productive. To put it into a different area, it is theoretically possible for a student to pick up a calculus text book and learn it on their own. It is also possible that you can get a really bad calculus teacher, like the one I had the second half of my freshman year, and that teacher can make things worse. On the other hand, you can have a teacher who makes everything so crystal clear that learning becomes close to effortless.

Five months ago I had a student take AOW from me within two days of completing OW. He has gotten a lot of instruction with me since then. He is currently working on his technical diving certification, and with his current skills, he could easily start cave training today. I don't think the average diver would be there using self teaching.

You used the analogy of coaching. I am certified to teach volleyball by the USVBA and soccer by the USSA, both at a pretty high level. To get those certifications, I had to undergo a lot of training. Here are some concepts of coaching that are ignored by a lot of coaches and scuba instructors.

1. All skill instruction should be as game-like as possible. In soccer, you see untrained coaches have players pair off and pass the ball back and forth to each other while standing still. That never happens in a game. In fact, if you analyze what game-like passing and receiving look like, you will see that every step in the passing/receiving process those players are practicing is wrong, and they are ingraining incorrect skills. A far better thing to do is simply make two small teams and have them play keep away. They will have more fun and learn the correct skills, almost without having to be told what they are. The major scuba equivalent is teaching skills while people are overweighted and kneeling on the bottom. If you think about skills, they are different when done that way than when they are done in a real diving posture. Students need to learn in a real diving posture, not kneeling.

2. You need to maximize repetitions. The most game-like way to practice soccer is an 11 on 11 scrimmage, but that minimizes the repetitions for each individual. Practices should be designed with as little unproductive activity for each individual as possible. In scuba, whenever possible, students should be active. If you have a large class, you don't want them to spend an eternity watching as each student does a skill. Find a way to keep them active. One way is to have an assistant watch half the class swim while the rest work on the new skills.

3. Students learn very little from verbal explanations. They do learn something, and I have learned that if I explain a skill with just the right words, it can almost perfectly prevent problems with performance. But long explanations are counterproductive. In scuba, you need to brief the key points, but don't belabor it--get them under water and active.

4. Imitation is the best teacher. Students need to see what it looks like to perform a skill. When they see it done correctly, they will imitate it. If they think a skill is being done correctly and are wrong, they will imitate that mistake. The volleyball coaches I had for that training ran high school summer camps very year, and they said they could almost perfectly match up the players who are on the same high school team by the fact that they were doing the same things wrong. They felt that they were usually imitating a teammate, and if they could change that teammate, they could change the rest. The lesson for scuba is that the instructor and all assistants should look like divers at all times.

 

[beanojones]

The logical fallacy in that statement is that you omit the possibility that instruction can be productive.

It's not a logical fallacy to say that instruction can be productive or counterproductive, and is not necessary.

I could quote my own post where I said just that but since you missed it the first time I won't bury it.

As you noted:

Because instruction has an affect, we need to make sure it is a positive one, and not a negative one.

We got rid of kneeling to great effect, by both actually training divers in the skills as performed in the position of a diver, but even more so because we got rid of the counterproductivity of kneeling divers.

Kneeling divers was actually retarding training, and confusing student in positioning, muscle memory and proprioception, or more importantly the lack of developing proprioception in a neutral buoyancy environment. In the end, it was negative value. It did not actually teach divers how to do these things while diving. And it prevented them from learning to do dive-like behaviors, which is how things like the panicked diver managed to risk injury due to simply losing a mask in the PNW incident recently.

NO positive benefit because the training was not done in dive-like situations, and a negative benefit because it laid down counter productive behaviors.

My question is this: Why stop thinking about the course now?

Just as the proof of the neutral buoyancy no kneeling training is in the divers competence, the proof in a tightly integrated logical progression, minimal demos/briefs course is in the end result. And just as neutral buoyancy training dramatically improves the end results, so too does treating diving training like diving, instead of some weird extended classroom.

(On a side note, what you actually lay out is exactly what I am saying, though I don't take the coaching analogy very seriously at all. Competitive Sports Teams have a selection bias in body type, age, fitness levels and skills that means the raw materials for coaching, say, a soccer team are orders of magnitude more similar than the raw materials a dive instructor gets.

As anyone who has coached mixed gender/mixed age sports teams knows.)

Those ideas are not currently orthodox. I had to look twice to see if your username was "Martin Luther".

if you notice, my status is "lacks common sense". That can be read a number of ways, depending on how you parse it.

 

[Iralub]

To be clear... students who do their ENTIRE training in warm water have a significantly higher drop-out rate than those that do pool work locally and referral dives in a warm location.

If what you say is true - and it may well be - what then is the explanation for "tropically trained" divers dropping out at higher rate?

I would guess that the explanation is the initial level of commitment. People on holidays in the tropics are more likely to do a diving course as an available activity - like going on a sightseeing tour. Such "opportunity dive" students may not have any desire/commitment to diving as a long-term activity and so unsurprisingly drop out.

Persons who go to the trouble to train locally in a pool and then do referral OW dives are more likely to be committed to doing diving as a long-term thing. The same would apply to tropically trained divers who go to the tropical locations specifically for the purpose of learning to dive.

I did my OW on Phi Phi island Thailand, which is as touristy a place as you can get. It wasn't an "opportunity dive experience", I deliberately booked the trip around giving myself enough time to do the OW course with a particular well-regarded dive centre there, so it was tropical diving with intent to continue diving.

The course was done one on one with the instructor, who was excellent, thorough and patient. She made sure I could do all the skills in confined water (shallow beach, not pool), including repeating anything I had trouble with until I was confident with it (ie that damn mask removal exercise). The experience started my love of diving. There is no reason to believe that I would get better training had I done the course locally.

 

[descent]

Those ideas are not currently orthodox.

... if you notice, my status is "lacks common sense".

Not disapproval. Admiration.

 

[SanDiegoSidemount]

Many students - seeing certification as merely something that stands in between them and the ability to go diving - seek out the quickest route to receiving their c-card. Perhaps there is some benefit in showing them that while divers who have taken short, crowded classes may get a c-card at the end... they are also less likely to be prepared for their open water dives... and end up being less satisfied with their training experience overall.

Yes. But HOW do we "show" students that they will be less satisfied in the long run by taking the "quickest route", while they are still in training? What does this conversation sound like?

As others have mentioned, this is a "Catch-22" of scuba training ... a student won't realize until much later on (if ever) whether they were trained well or inadequately.

This is my dilemma as I explain to students why my Open Water class will take 30+ combined hours of classroom, pool and ocean time. At this point in their training, very few students know what type of instruction they want ... they just want to get a C-card.

I do my best to explain, but I know they won't really "get it" until later.