beester
Contributor
I agree with Ginti... teaching is a skill that can and needs to be trained. Yes I know some natural teachers (I believe I am one) but also they benefit from didactical training. I'm an IT trainer/consultant/project manager and have seen both ends of the spectrum (good trainers without skills and experts without training skills).
The point is technical skills are relatively easy to check, real live experience and consequently the mental bandwith this gives you while training plus didactical skills (specially in water) are less easy to verify.
Teaching skills are as important (if not more) than technical diving skills although they go hand in hand. If you can't communicate effectively to your students, if you can't brief and debrief effectively, if you can't see which of your students is getting stressed and / or reaching his taskloading limit vs the other student who is coasting through, if you can't manage time efficiently in the context of a course... then you can be the number 1 diver in the world, your skills won't matter because you are not transfering that knowledge to your students.
When I opened up before that I don't feel that I reach a high enough level to teach technical courses (let's say normoxic and up) it's about the didactical part, not totally the experience/technical part. That's why I say to be a very good technical instructor you need to be a professional. I teach 3 to 5 classes per year. Half to 2/3rds of those are essentials style classes and 1 to 2 will be a technical class (typical T1 range, so 50m max depth, 30 min max deco). That vs GUE instructors I know who teach 10 to 15 T1 classes per year, 5 T2 classes and 10 CCR (MOD1 or MOD 3) classes. All students make the same mistakes... they see these mistakes 10/15 times per year, I see them once or twice.... this alone gives them more bandwith to be on top of a class, because they can almost predict what error a student is going to make before the student is thinking about making it. (that plus they are world class divers of course)
Is that a didactical skill or a technical/experience skill... I think both ;-)
PS: My feeling has nothing to do with my technical diving range... I do sufficiently high level technical diving and participate in GUE projects that are reasonably deep.
The point is technical skills are relatively easy to check, real live experience and consequently the mental bandwith this gives you while training plus didactical skills (specially in water) are less easy to verify.
Teaching skills are as important (if not more) than technical diving skills although they go hand in hand. If you can't communicate effectively to your students, if you can't brief and debrief effectively, if you can't see which of your students is getting stressed and / or reaching his taskloading limit vs the other student who is coasting through, if you can't manage time efficiently in the context of a course... then you can be the number 1 diver in the world, your skills won't matter because you are not transfering that knowledge to your students.
When I opened up before that I don't feel that I reach a high enough level to teach technical courses (let's say normoxic and up) it's about the didactical part, not totally the experience/technical part. That's why I say to be a very good technical instructor you need to be a professional. I teach 3 to 5 classes per year. Half to 2/3rds of those are essentials style classes and 1 to 2 will be a technical class (typical T1 range, so 50m max depth, 30 min max deco). That vs GUE instructors I know who teach 10 to 15 T1 classes per year, 5 T2 classes and 10 CCR (MOD1 or MOD 3) classes. All students make the same mistakes... they see these mistakes 10/15 times per year, I see them once or twice.... this alone gives them more bandwith to be on top of a class, because they can almost predict what error a student is going to make before the student is thinking about making it. (that plus they are world class divers of course)
Is that a didactical skill or a technical/experience skill... I think both ;-)
PS: My feeling has nothing to do with my technical diving range... I do sufficiently high level technical diving and participate in GUE projects that are reasonably deep.
