I suspect that is true. Take my case, I teach almost exactly the course I was taught (modified slightly for changes in gear and environment), and I teach it almost exactly the way it was taught to me. So I get great results. This is strengthened by the fact that the Instructors we trained, whom we first trained as divers have a similar experience.
Think about this for a minute:
My transition from classroom teacher to what I later became started when I was selected to be part of a small group of very successful teachers going to some workshops on different teaching strategies. We were all taken aback by what we saw that first day. It was all very different from what we had always done. It all seemed wrong to us. On the second day of the workshops only one other teacher from our group and I returned. The rest dismissed it out of hand because it looked so wrong.
I went back because a couple of points had bugged me (the technical term for this is that it created a cognitive dissonance), and I wanted to hear more. I grew intrigued by it, and I decided to try one of the ideas in my class. I was about to teach one of my favorite lessons (On
Oedipus Rex), the kind of instruction I felt was so successful that if I ever wanted anyone to judge my quality, it would be on that lesson. I totally redid it in a way looked nothing like what I had done before.
The results were so stunningly successful that my cognitive dissonance went through the roof. I began doing research and trying one new thing after another. Before long I was a totally different teacher, and when I looked back at my past experiences, the ones that had gotten me a reputation as a successful teacher, I now saw them as failures. When I met former students and they began to gush about how great my class was, I felt like apologizing.
I was teaching in a school with low student demographics, a school with no history of academic success. I talked the English Department into using some of these methods in writing instruction, and in two years we went from next to last to first in a district of 20 high schools in writing assessment results.
My colleagues who had walked out of the workshops had other ideas, though. They clung to their older methodologies, and fought my attempts to change things. They had always been successful doing things this way, they argued, and they ridiculed all change. I was teaching Advanced Placement, and one year I had more students get the highest possible score (5) than all the other AP classes in the school had pass the exam (3) combined. But those teachers kept insisting I was doing it all wrong. One teacher, who never had a single student pass the AP exam, even told the students we had in common that I was teaching them wrong and he was doing it right.
But all the studies aside, if there is a consistent and high level evaluation of the final product (which we have always had) and there is an almost non-existent failure rate
Id be inclined to go with the obvious
we have a program that delivers a quality product. On the other hand, when you look at the PADI program (or other also) that have a rather low bar and yet have a significant failure rate, you have to ask if they have any idea of what they are doing, or do they know exactly what they are doing for reasons that are completely clear. If you have another explanation, fell free to chime in.
f.
As I said earlier, there are too many variables at play here to make a comparison. I pointed out that studies have shown that teachers in disadvantaged schools are often (definitely not always) doing a much better job than teachers in schools in affluent communities when you compare the difference between entrance and exit performance, and all studies have shown this to be true. Yet, if you were to look at the measures that the public usually uses, you get a totally different perspective. The school my children attended is proud of the number of students they send to prestigious universities, yet I know that the last accreditation evaluation they received was scathing in part. A friend of mine was on that team, and he said the school's motto should be "A School for the dedicated, self-motivated, independent learner, and the rest of you can just go to Hell."
After I went through the transformation described above, I studied education theory because my new job was to try to teach other teachers to do what I was doing. (It was a very misguided and now thoroughly discredited theory that teachers will listen more to other teachers than to experts.) That as in the early to mid 1990s. When I became a scuba instructor years later, I had to read the Undersea Journal articles PADI had put out in early to mid 1990s trying to explain why they were doing what they were doing in their changes. I was surprised to see them citing some of the same research I had been reading then. So I would say that, yes, PADI has a very firm pedagogical foundation for what they are doing.
[By the way, little has changed in education since those days. The methods to which I was introduced back then are very much accepted by education experts, and very much ignored by classroom teachers, who still continue to teach the way they were taught. The state content standards for the most part (with a few glaring exceptions) are written with those approaches in mind, and one of the biggest problems with that is that it creates a mismatch between what the teachers are doing and what the state says they are supposed to be producing.]
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