Is there an instructor crisis?

[Cthippo]

After reading all of this I think PADI or any other agencies that use the term need to get rid of the term "Mastery" since it's misleading. They should just be honest and use a term that more accurately describes their actual program requirement.... like...."good enough" or "acceptable"..

But then those terms don't sound nearly as impressive as "Mastery"... And the more that I really think about it....my take is that 99% of divers fresh out of OW with 4-5 dives under their belt haven't "Mastered" a damn thing.

Part of my job is evaluating and rating new firefighters and the term we use is "Minimally competent"

 

[VikingDives]

After reading all of this I think PADI or any other agencies that use the term need to get rid of the term "Mastery" since it's misleading. They should just be honest and use a term that more accurately describes their actual program requirement.... like...."good enough" or "acceptable"..

But then those terms don't sound nearly as impressive as "Mastery"... And the more that I really think about it....my take is that 99% of divers fresh out of OW with 4-5 dives under their belt haven't "Mastered" a damn thing.

My standard (and NAUI's and TDI/SDI's) is "would you let a loved one dive with this person?" I judge that on my youngest's first dive as an open water diver. If I'd feel comfortable with my student diving with my kid on his sixth dive, my student gets a c-card. If not, they come back for more training. THAT is a standard that anyone can judge. We can bandy around terms like mastery and minimally competent forever, but if you judge divers based on a "I'd trust her not to kill my relatives," I think we can all agree that that's a standard everyone could "live" with.

 

[MrVegas]

The difference being that the training agencies invented certification, membership, and insurance, then convinced dive operators that you had to be certified to go diving.

I can buy a lift ticket at a Vail Resort, rent skis, and ride the lift to the top without having a clue what I’m doing.

This is a brilliant comment! The problem is that the certification standards have become the de facto legal standards for insurance and probably for negligence cases as well. (E.g., is a dive operator or dive site always in the wrong if it ever permits an OW diver to go past 60 feet?) I'm not sure this is a good thing.

Anyway, I tend to just lurk on the instructor discussions on ScubaBoard because I am not an instructor. But I doubt there will be an "instructor crisis" in the sense that the consumer can't get a certification if they want one. The question is -- who is experiencing the crisis? The people that want to go diving, or the instructors? I mean this in the sense that scuba is a consumer driven industry, right? I mean -- with a few exceptions -- no one has to go diving, they choose to go diving. Are there not instructors available?

 

[JonnieB]

I used to get dive calls from a flyer I had pinned up out at the marina. I get a call one day to go do a boat bottom cleaning that no one else wanted to do. The guy bought the boat sight unseen and it was totally overgrown. So I meet the guy there and get started. On those jobs it was time and materials at a rate of $75 hour (10 years ago).
It took about three hours of hard work using a couple steel 72’s. He needed some zincs which I had in stock so I sold those too. While I was there someone else came up and wondered if I’d have time to put on a few zincs on his boat and look it over for blisters. And then a crab guy comes up and needs to have some crab line undone from his prop.
I went out there to do one job and by the end of the day walked away with $600 cash.

Moral of the story, there is money in diving you just need to know where to look.
Hint: It’s not teaching OW classes.

Lake Hickory Scuba has a YT video on just this point

 

[NW Dive Dawg]

The term has been an accepted and well understood part of instructional theory for 55 years now. It is well understood by professional educators, and it is defined in the agency standards.

Why should they create a new term when there is a well understood one already in existence?

I'm just thinking that "Sufficient for your current level of certification" would be far more accurate and less misleading than the term "Mastery". So here's a question..... If a certified PADI OW diver has already "Mastered" buoyancy in his/her OW course, then why would PADI try to sell them a specialty buoyancy course? .

 

[Tracy]

Part of my job is evaluating and rating new firefighters and the term we use is "Minimally competent"

Thank you for that phrase. It is getting printed on my next batch of business cards. Possibly even my e-mail signature.

 

[MichaelMc]

Here's your problem. All assessment of student performance has the same problem. It comes down to the ability of what assessment expert Grant Wiggins termed "trained assessor judgment." The key word is "judgement."

BTW, as part of my job, I helped write performance standards and train evaluators for various educational assessments. If you saw the definitions for scoring for AP exams, SAT exams, LSAT exams, etc., you would wonder how anything meaningful can be done from that basis.

But it happens. In those very serious assessments, students will have two assessors, and the expectation is that those two scores will be within a certain range (depends upon the scoring range), or they are kicked out. They strive for 90% agreement on scores. As the evaluators go through their work, they encounter what are called benchmark performances--examples that were previously expertly scored and then reinserted in the list to be scored again. If the evaluator scores it too far off from the original expert score, the evaluator is pulled out of work for recalibration.

That is for high stakes assessments with multiple scoring levels. The training for scuba instructors in the IDC follows the same system, and it uses only a 2 level scoring system.

John, you're clearly an expert an educational theory.

Yet an issue as applied to scuba seems to be the re-calibration you mention. For the SAT, AP, etc, evaluation is done fairly centrally and based on a piece of paper. This mean gold-standard graded reference-essays can be inserted into the workflow of evaluators marking batches of current year students. So evaluator calibration drift (or laziness) can be easily detected and rectified.

I don't think scuba has that same re-calibration, plus it has an economic incentive to pass students. Using the shop Course Director (who likely owns the shop) as the re-calibration judge seems problematic because of their conflict of short-term economic interest.

So the application on the ground may not be as nice as it is in theory, or when spot checks are cheap.

<<< ===== >>>>

A proposal:

A five minute video of final pool skills done twice each with no video cuts is sent to the agency at pool training completion along with a photo for the eventual cert card. The skills include at least: flooded mask, mask remove/replace, reg recovery, and several skills required to be done neutrally buoyant.

The instructor certifies pool training completion. But if an instructor's students' videos show deficiencies, the instructor must do retraining before training more students. Falsifying videos has harsh consequences.

On the model that instructors certify students, and agencies or instructor trainers certify instructors. Though blocking the pool deficient diver's cert card until a remediating video is submitted might be a good idea, in case they later drown.

Bonus points if the agency publishes an anonymized grid of each instructor's last several videos on the instructor lookup page.

 

[Jcp2]

Part of my job is evaluating and rating new firefighters and the term we use is "Minimally competent"

Is the next step up “tolerably mediocre”?

 

[drrich2]

Following the thread, I doubt whether OW student proficiency is defined as 'mastery,' 'marginally competent' or what-have-you has much impact on the supply and availability of recreational diving instructors in the U.S. It's like 'Son of all the threads debating PADI's Master Scuba Diver cert.'

A proposal:

A five minute video of final pool skills done twice each with no video cuts is sent to the agency at pool training completion along with a photo for the eventual cert card.

That would add time and cost to the OW training process, and create a video evidence record that could be contested in liability suits. How many posts have we seen lamenting how little OW instructors average/hour or in total for the work they do?

The instructor certifies pool training completion. But if an instructor's students' videos show deficiencies, the instructor must do retraining before training more students.

I don't think that's going to aid instructor retention. I'm retired from (mental) health care, where (at least in the inpatient setting) one has to deal with requirements from CMS (Medicare/Medicaid), Joint Commission (technically voluntary participation, but that's a discussion in its own right) and OIG (Office of Inspector General), plus if you're in a state facility meddling from the department you fall under. And people in health care are ever concerned about liability issues. Guess what the bureaucrat response to alleged deficiencies and liability risk (neither of which is ever permanently gone) is?

More technical requirements. More paper work. More formal certifications. Things I sum up as 'put the screws to them.' Occasionally a mandated change in process produces improvements (not unlike others described training OW in horizontal trim rather than on their knees), but a lot seemed to be part of the problem.

I don't think it's practical, it might not do much good and could create problems (e.g.: in a lawsuit the plaintiff's attorney get an expert witness to dispute the results of your video; even if he's wrong, the jury isn't sure).

On a related note, have you guys bought a washing machine, a dryer or similar appliance at a Sears or similar lately? Some salesmen are capable and superficially friendly, yes, but I get the feeling they're tightly micromanaged living under the threat of less-than-perfect customer surveys. I would not want to live that way, desperate for great reviews. How many recreational dive instructors want to be constantly closely monitored and nitpicked?

It sounds like instructor pay needs to go up drastically in order for scuba training to continue, at least here.

My LDS used to have 10-12 instructors on their list or resources back 20 years ago. Now there is one and she’s 65 and wants to retire. They cannot find anyone that want’s to do it.
Is this a regional home town problem only and not at resorts?

If the local shops can’t find instructors then does that mean they just get into selling gear and trips and they will have to hope that people get certs somewhere else on vacation?

So far it seems (to me) the perspective has been on health of local dive shops, quality of newly minted OW divers and viability of business models.

What about from the perspective of people interested in scuba diving? If there's an instructor crisis, is it a crisis for them?

Are a lot of people who want to take an OW course unable locally because the LDS's are closed? Are more people traveling farther to take an OW course? Or are OW divers having to travel to take AOW courses?

 

[Marie13]

My local quarry has a max depth of about 60ft, aside from a sump in the far corner that goes to 80-85ft, depending on water level. And that sump is dark with very low viz in more recent years (my dives there were in 2017). If you want to have a better deep dive experience for your AOW, you have to drive at least 4 hours (quarries in WI, OH, far southern IL), unless you can manage to get a good weather day and do it on a Lake Michigan wreck.

So availability of local dive sites has something to do with divers traveling for AOW even if they’re willing to do it “at home.”