Dispelling scubaboard myths (Part 1: It is the instructor not the agency)

[Lorenzoid]

And here's the problem with the "problem taking care of itself". It's in how the problem takes care of itself, I agree that it does, and I've seen it multiple times. A dive shop certifies a whole bunch of students, then takes them on a liveaboard (I ran such a liveaboard before I bought it). They get their butts kicked by weather, by strong currents, by the food, by all kinds of things. I saw multiple multiple Whole sets of gear with 3 dives on it sold again on the way home. So the way the problem sorts itself out is because folks quit diving. Very few are going to get over the hump of "this is great but I'm nervous" without guidance. The kind of guidance that diving with an instructor/mentor gives you. The kind of guidance that a good long university semester class gives you. The kind of guidance that "don't take a frickin brand new OW diver on a Gulf of Mexico liveaboard, are you stupid?" gives you.

Scuba isn't easy, but it can be done easily. Scuba isn't safe, but it can be done safely.

I suppose that should be a "problem" from the perspective of dive industry professionals. Finding lightly used equipment up for sale all over the Internet is great for the rest of us. So long as getting their "butts kicked" doesn't rise to the level of their safety being in danger ....

Who are these dive shops that encouraged newly minted OW divers to take a Gulf of Mexico liveaboard? Is that really common, or is it a regional thing? When I was a newer diver, I recall being discouraged by a diver friend from even going to Cozumel because of the currents. I've always been encouraged to take "baby steps." I suppose even now I am still following that advice.

 

[chrisch]

A couple of observations...
After reading this thread, it appears that the majority responding here believe in the ScubaBoard "myth" that it's the instructor and not the agency. Maybe it's not such a myth? I've seen good and bad instructors in EVERY agency including those that some regard as elite (sorry, GUE).....

It seems to me - both in diving and academia - that emphasis is given to the ability of the instructor as a participant and this is an indicator of their teaching abilities. I do not support this view. You can be real good at something and not able to teach it. You can be a really good teacher and not particularly good at it yourself.

I would expand this by suggesting that a lot of people who think they are good divers like to massage their ego by being an instructor. In that spirit I would also like to point out that the basic skills of diving are not that hard and the basic requirements to be an open water instructor are not that hard either. So what constitutes good or bad (let's go mediocre not "bad") will depend a great deal on the expectations of the student. To confuse things even more there are commercial requirements in scuba training - the instructor and the centre both need to make a profit.

A really good educator might inspire you to study something you were not previously interested in (like science) or s/he might demystify something that seemed impenetrable (like mathematics), a mediocre educator might well give you a good education in any subject in which you are already interested. A good student might seek out other sources of data and informations, they might look objectively at the subject and realise that not everything is cut and dried. A mediocre student might just want the exam results to get a job, or go dive or be able to drive a car.

Honestly then, the instructor makes a difference. No two student experiences will be the same. Don't forget humans are complex social animals - we like or dislike people for all sorts of irrational reasons. At the most basic level of dive training - the PADI OW or equivalent - I would hope that all the people offering training can at least get the basics right and turn out a diver that is able to safely conduct a shallow warm water dive. Going beyond that it is - in my view anyway - much more important to find someone that you feel is working with you to a defined goal. Both student and instructor need to be "good".

There are no scuba police. You can buy the equipment, read a book and go diving. The packaging of the basic training as some sort of "commodity" is a function of the need to make money, to sell gear, to fill hotel rooms, to keep boat skippers in business. So, for me, it is both the syllabus (or agency if you like) and the instructor that are important. If most agencies have the same syllabus at the basic level it is because the basic skills are universally accepted as required. The more you move from the core skills the more important the educator becomes.

 

[stuartv]

The teacher preparation, observation, and evaluation process costs many, many thousands of dollars for each individual teacher, and yet we have a frightening level of incompetence throughout the system. How can ANY scuba agency hope to achieve anything better with only a tiny fraction of that funding and an even smaller fraction of training time?

There are some differences that seem to me like they are important.

Scuba training is entirely elective. Nobody has to do it. Everybody has to go to school. Public schools have to accommodate whatever number of students happen to be in their district. They do not have the luxury of saying "sorry, we can't accept half of you this year because we couldn't hire enough competent teachers." So, they have to hire teachers that may be of dubious competence in order to meet the demands that the public system puts on them.

Scuba training agencies do not have those requirements.

I wonder what would happen if a big diving school in a big market chose to:
- Pay a living wage, but train and filter instructors hard and keep only "the good ones".
- Advertise the living dickens out of that fact.
- Create and maintain that "rate my instructor" board...

Would they go out of business, because classes cost too much and the groupon shops successfully starve them out?
Would they thrive?
Would people go out of their way to schedule their next trip there?
(Sort of like going to Disney because of all associated with it despite the pricing instead of goung the local fair)
Would they be shunned by the rest of the dive industry because they spill the beans?
Would they put a big enough dent into the system to raise the quality of instruction system wide over time?

I doubt the positive outcomes would be an all to realistic expectation. But I wonder.

If they only offered Open Water classes, they would surely go out of business promptly because they would be too expensive. If they offered OW classes as a loss leader at a price that was competitive with the other agencies, they would still go out of business because they would never make enough money on the advanced classes to cover all the losses from the OW classes.

Thus, you have agencies like GUE and UTD. They are probably the closest to what you describe, in that they seem to have higher standards for becoming an instructor (though still far from the Scuba Utopia that you actually described). They aren't (apparently) going out of business, but they aren't big. They exist as "boutique" agencies. They are the Ducatis of the Scuba industry.

In my opinion none of the agencies have standards remotely close to high enough to be remarkable in assuring a quality instructor.

Is it that they don't have high enough standards? Or that they don't have the RIGHT standards? Just one example: I think none of the agencies has any requirement for an educational background or training for its instructors. If they should, then it's not a case of not having a high enough standard. It's more a case of not having the right standard, I think.

Just as they all require 1st Aid/CPR/etc training as a prerequisite for Rescue, maybe they should require at least a class or two, along the lines of the two that @tbone1004 has mentioned. Classes that teach you how to teach. And then have a separate course that they can offer, like DAN offers DEMP and SDI offers CPROX, for people who don't already meet the requirement some other way.

If the major agencies all started requiring instructor candidates to take a college course on education, I bet that would cut down on Zero-to-Hero professionals and increase instructor competency...

I've never seen this, so it must be specific to a particular and unique 'resort area'.

The cost of multiple agency annual memberships, on a regular dive Instructor's income, would be ludicrous.

My shop offers OW classes (and other classes) with certification from SDI, SSI, PADI, and NAUI (that I can think of). Most of the instructors have done all the crossovers and maintain instructor status with all those agencies so that we can accommodate whatever a student wants on their card. I am doing my IDC with my shop now to be an SDI instructor, but they have already mentioned, at some point after I finish, having me cross over to PADI and, at least, SSI, so that I can be of use when a potential student comes along and wants something other than our default.

Our default is SDI. We recently had a student come along that was in town for a couple of weeks for work. He's been training as an SSI diver. He wanted to do a couple of specialty certifications with us while he was here and wanted them to be issued as SSI to stay within the "ecosystem" he is used to and will be returning to at home. Fortunately, we had instructors who could do that for him.

 

[The Chairman]

There are no scuba police.

:scinq:​

My shop offers OW classes

I know lots of instructors with overlapping agencies. So many, I thought it was kind of like a standard practice. I teach for three agencies, having dropped one along the way, so your experience mirrors mine.

I think none of the agencies has any requirement for an educational background or training for its instructors.

I beg to differ as that's what the ITC is for. That's the point at which a DM is supposedly taught how to teach. You may not think it rigorous enough, and certainly, an argument can be made for that. It's my less than humble opinion that a thousand dives would be a better pre-requirement than 100. But then, I've seen divers who could teach trim and buoyancy better at less than 50 dives than many a seasoned professional with more than 5,000 dives. You can't teach it if you can't (or won't) do it.

 

[KevinNM]

Thus, you have agencies like GUE and UTD. They are probably the closest to what you describe, in that they seem to have higher standards for becoming an instructor (though still far from the Scuba Utopia that you actually described). They aren't (apparently) going out of business, but they aren't big. They exist as "boutique" agencies. They are the Ducatis of the Scuba industry.

Of the 7 GUE instructors I have either seriously interacted with or taken classes from, 4 had full time jobs other than teaching diving (though they were all diving related). Two taught GUE full time, one teaching high-end classes pretty consistently, the other getting the experience needed to do that ( which is a slow and expensive process), the last seemed to mostly make money teaching PADI students in a virtual dive shop and taught GUE classes when practical. They all were highly experienced tech divers before becoming instructors.

 

[RainPilot]

No this concern is not specific to OW.

When I did my AOW, the instructor was in absolute violation of agency standards. I had no idea what the agency standards were because as a new AOW you what do you know? I interviewed him and there was nothing in that interview that would tell me that he would be violating standards. It was much later that I found out that you can not double up on the dives. You cant take the student on a two dive charter and have one tank dive logged as "deep" because you were 100' and have it logged as wreck because you were on a wreck and then call it "drift" because there was some current on the way up! The same instructor had turned out many students who probably did not even understand that they were short ended.

Do you believe that your AOW instructor would be any better if he happened to teach for some other agency? I don't. I think this is a textbook example of "it's the instructor not the agency".

 

[boulderjohn]

@Saboteur honestly? for basic open water just get him certified by wherever is cheapest or wherever you go for air fills and then mentor him. At the recreational level, shopping for an instructor is usually a wasted effort in my opinion because the courses are so short that it isn't going to make that much of a difference

I think I did a pretty good job teaching within the time frame I had when I first started teaching. Then I couldn't help but notice that when I taught a simple 2-hour discover diving course to children, they ended those 2 hours looking like better divers than the ones finishing the entire OW pool experience. I began to investigate why. After a lot of experimentation, it became clear that the difference was that the focus of the DSD class was having fun diving, while the focus of the OW class was kneeling on the bottom of the pool doing skills. The 2-hour DSD class had more time with students neutrally buoyant and in horizontal trim than the entire multi-day OW pool session.

The solution was to get OW students off their knees for the skills. Once I had students neutrally buoyant and horizontal throughout the OW experience, they completed that part of the class at an entirely different level of skill compared to what I had been doing before, and they did it in the same amount of time as before.

One day I did a 1-tank dive with two friends in Akumal. The DM we had had never seen us before. After the dive, he said the 3 of us were the only ones signed up for the afternoon dive, and he wanted to take us to a more challenging site, one that would be a better match to our experience. We agreed. Unfortunately, a couple with only about 25 dives signed up and ruined that experience. He explained that the fact that they did not have our vast experience meant they were not ready for the advanced site. I explained to him that I had just certified my two friends the day before. The two dives he had led us on that day were their first two dives as OW divers.

So the OW class you take can make a HUGE difference, even in the short amount of time. If the class is taught as is typically done--overweighted and on the knees--the newly certified divers will be very different from those taught while properly weighted, horizontal, and neutrally buoyant.

 

[boulderjohn]

Scuba training is entirely elective. Nobody has to do it. Everybody has to go to school. Public schools have to accommodate whatever number of students happen to be in their district. They do not have the luxury of saying "sorry, we can't accept half of you this year because we couldn't hire enough competent teachers." So, they have to hire teachers that may be of dubious competence in order to meet the demands that the public system puts on them.

Is it your impression that school districts have to hire a whole new set of teaches each year, and they have to select from lists of teachers who come in with no training?

hus, you have agencies like GUE and UTD. They are probably the closest to what you describe, in that they seem to have higher standards for becoming an instructor (though still far from the Scuba Utopia that you actually described).

those agencie do indeed make sure that their instructors have great diving skills.

What do they do to make sure they have superior instructional skills?

 

[tbone1004]

@boulderjohn

one of the things we do in our OW portion of the course is to let the students descent to the bottom of the dock at ~20ft and play around for 5-10 minutes. Calms nerves, and makes the rest of the two days go so much better. Play time is something that needs to happen and unfortunately rarely does

 

[boulderjohn]

A friend of mine went to college intending to be an engineer. He took Freshman Calculus, and half way through that first semester he realized that being an engineer was not for him. Calculus was just too hard--he was failing the class miserably. He dropped it and began to reconsider his major. He decided to give it another shot, and he took the class again the next semester with a different teacher. To his amazement, calculus was now easy. He got an A, and he breezed through his engineering program from then on.

There is a strange human psychological phenomenon that thinks "If I'm working really hard, I must be getting an advantage." That makes them think that a class that is really, really hard to pass must be better than one that seems easy. It makes them think that a course with a really high failure rate must be a really good class, and a teacher who only gets a small percentage of people through must be exceptionally good. That makes no sense; it is like praising a plumber whose pipe joints usually leak. A teacher's job is to intervene in student learning in such a way that those who struggle will find a path to success. All teachers will have some failures, but if a teacher has a lot of failures, something is wrong.

I was once the Executive Director of Curriculum for a major educational design company. A well-designed curriculum uses the best design theory to ensure that students are most likely to meet the goals of the curriculum in the amount of time allotted for the class. No course design can make a student successful in Freshman calculus in only a month, but a poorly-designed course can make just about anyone unsuccessful in any amount of time.

I began working for that company as a contractor hired to analyze a foreign language program with a very high failure rate. I determined first of all that the curriculum was about as badly designed as it could be, but yet there were individual teachers who were being successful anyway. My analysis showed that even with that poorly designed curriculum, a highly skilled teacher was able to overcome it and enable student success. When we later developed a state-of-the-art curriculum, students flourished with almost all the teachers--but there were some who still had high failure rates; incompetent teachers will fail with even the best course design.

So if a course has a high failure rate, folks, it is not a good sign. It could be the course design that is the problem. It could be the teacher that is the problem. It could be both. Whatever the reason, a high failure rate in a course is nothing to brag about.