I’m a professional educator (not in scuba), and one of the things driven home to me all the time when watching dive instruction is that just because someone is a good diver does *not* mean they will be a good instructor. That is, the dive skills are necessary but insufficient to be a good instructor.
If you break it down into whether people *can* and *want* to be a good instructor, it becomes clearer.
Plenty of instructors out there are, quite frankly, not highly motivated to provide super high quality instruction. I think most of us have encountered these instructors at a recreational level - they fudge standards, do the bare minimum required, seem annoyed to be there, are extra annoyed if any students have actual problems or are slow picking up a skill. My open water and AOW instructors were like this, unfortunately. My Rescue instructor was better, but only marginally.
Whatever their motivations for teaching - money (ha!), ego, interpersonal obligation, etc - intrinsic desire to provide high quality instruction is not at the top of the list. This isn’t a personal attack - burnout is very common in underpaid, “passion” careers, and scuba diving is a prime candidate for that. Many instructors who come in highly motivated don’t end that way.
Motivated instructors use course standards as a starting point and often add additional material; unmotivated instructors use them to do the bare required minimum (if that). For instance, my cavern instructor felt there were skills that should be taught at the cavern level that weren’t required for the course - so we did those at the end of the class, because they were important for our education (if not for the cert!).
But, let’s assume we have a highly motivated instructor - one who WANTS earnestly to do the best possible job they can. The question then is, can they? And that requires two sets of skills - content skills (ie “can they dive”) but also pedagogical skills. I’m going to set content skills aside - obviously, it’s hard to be a good teacher if you haven’t yourself mastered the dive skills you’re teaching.
The pedagogical skills are trickier, and I think often overlooked in the dive community.
Do you know how do learn? How you help someone learn who doesn’t learn the way you did? Can you lecture well - in ways that are informative, engaging, and not just literally reading the textbook or review quizzes out loud? Can you mix lecture content with in-person demonstrations and hands-on learning? Do you understand basic principles of scaffolding - starting easy and layering complexity (first with help, then removing that help)?
Experienced teachers pick up lots of tricks but also through time an understanding of what skills and concepts trip up the most learners, and get experience in trying different ways to teach those concepts. They learn what they MUST teach (the core ideas/skills), and what are “nice to have,” and how to balance the time spent on those.
Finally, there is the “teaching persona.” Different teachers have different styles, and students have different preferences for those styles. I respond much better to patient humorous student-based learning (“let students make their own mistakes - then let’s talk about them with warmth and humor”). Other people - esp older divers and men in my experience - love strict drill sergeant boot camp-style instruction. Neither is better or worse, but people differ markedly in how well they respond to them.
And specifically, in diving I’ve noticed a strong divide between “drills-based instruction” and “naturalistic instruction.” Again, neither is good or bad, but they are very different approaches. I think it is harder to LEARN how to deliver naturalistic instruction, and it’s easier to teach new instructors how to deliver drills-based instruction - it’s also more standardized, by its very nature. (Which is both a strength and a weakness).
Students also differ in how well they respond to the different approaches. Experienced more introspective and reflective divers do very well with naturalistic instruction. Newer or less reflective divers tend not to, because it requires noticing “what went well” and “what went wrong,” and thinking about what you can do to address those issues. That takes skills in self-observation and a willingness for critical self-reflection that take both experience to develop but also a certain personality. Newer divers may not know enough to know what went well vs poorly, and benefit more from repeated drilling for instance to develop that experience.
GUE spends a lot of time drilling and teaching its instructors in pedagogical skills, and standardizes a lot of the content and applied lessons (“drills”, “procedures”). This is easier for people without prior teaching experience to learn to do WELL, and produces a more standardized base quality experience. There are also not a lot of unmotivated GUE instructors out there - the high barrier to entry tends to deter that. You can’t become a GUE instructor on a whim on your 101st dive.
My favorite instructors have tended to be excellent divers who emphasize teaching through naturalistic experience, do so with warmth and humor, and are skilled at empathetic perspective-taking (putting themselves in the mind of the student). For instance, my cave instructor likes to address finning/trim/buoyancy by having his full cave students swim through the mud tunnels at Ginnie. If they’re clean, no further work to do there. If they’re not, well….not only do we have something to work on but also a VERY dramatic lesson on why proper finning technique matters.
You could do the same thing by swimming circuits at Blue Grotto and videotaping students and reviewing their finning/trim/buoyancy in post-dive debrief. I don’t prefer that approach myself, but will often recommend those instructors to newer divers or those who would benefit from a more “black-and-white” clear step-wise progression in a class. Likewise, some students ARE overconfident and brash - they need someone who will yell at them and shut it down before they get themselves (or someone else) killed. Other students are not, and that harsh approach is not only unnecessary but harmful.
In short: good instructors have some things in common (highly motivated, strong content and pedagogical skills), but the student-instructor fit is also very important. There’s lots of different ways to be a great instructor, and what works great for one student isn’t necessarily what will work best for another.
