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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.
 
I'm not sure this is true of instruction at the technical level. I have not seen a "race to the bottom" in terms of pricing for technical classes, prices seem pretty consistent at about 250-350 a day.
The volume of technical diving instructors being generated is nothing like that of recreational instructors. However, in my area, there is a preponderence of really bad technical instructors. I can count the good ones on two hands.
 
Not sure that recreational dive training helps particularly when the technical instructor candidate is properly qualified, i.e. they’ve done many hundreds of significant decompression and trimix dives and can answer what went wrong.

Agreed, some training experience with core skills might be helpful. However, the prospective instructor's own extensive experience is way more important and the actual teaching skills are far more easily developed than the years it took to master their technical diving skills. The "instructor training and development" process including all the mentoring and shadowing would sort that out.

This does assume that technical training agencies do their job properly.


TL;DR
Teaching is far easier to learn than the subject being taught.

I don't disagree with the summary, but teaching is a skill and having the ability to teach is necessary at the levels being discussed.

I would *HATE* to see the student of a guy teaching an AN/DP level course (or CCR MOD1) that has no real world teaching experience, regardless of how much diving experiences he has.
 
Just to summarise...

Of course I'm not saying that all people can teach; some people would be (are?) the world's worst teachers!

However, with the right aptitude, teaching skills can be learned.

My point was that "the agencies" need to do their side of the bargain through a thorough selection and development process. One would expect this to last for some considerable time given that technical courses don't run as frequently as the recreational syllabus.

I would *HATE* to see the student of a guy teaching an AN/DP level course (or CCR MOD1) that has no real world teaching experience, regardless of how much diving experiences he has.

Are people here implying that "the agencies" don't do this thorough quality control to select, develop and continually monitor their instructors and course material? Gosh.
 
Are people here implying that "the agencies" don't do this thorough quality control to select, develop and continually monitor their instructors and course material? Gosh.

You know the answer to that one!
 
I would *HATE* to see the student of a guy teaching an AN/DP level course (or CCR MOD1) that has no real world teaching experience, regardless of how much diving experiences he has.
I wish agencies would require internship where instructors shadow/assist teaching courses, then must be signed off by an IT.

While I wish this existed for recreational instructors (Lord, I could have used that), I do realize that with 20K new instructors per year (pre-covid), that doing so would be entirely impractical.

However, given the far lower numbers and the far higher risks in technical diving, it might be more feasible.

I likely will never teach tech (both OC/CC), as (1) that's fairly low volume (2) I will never have the experience on OC with helium to provide me with the necessary experience as I went to CC with the cost of helium and (3) I'm too old (50) to amass the dives and experience on CC to ever teach that.
 
I wish agencies would require internship where instructors shadow/assist teaching courses, then must be signed off by an IT.
Shirley all agencies require that of their technical instructor candidates?!?
 
Shirley all agencies require that of their technical instructor candidates?!?
No. I had started down that path with my first agency, but opted out in the end. Glad I did that and never taught anyone when I was at that level. Yikes!
 
No. I had started down that path with my first agency, but opted out in the end. Glad I did that and never taught anyone when I was at that level. Yikes!
Which meant the agency did the right thing. Their instructor candidate decided to defer and their customers got better trainers as a result.

We all want the same thing; good instructors make good students that make great customers for the dive shops and boats.


I believe NSS-CDS and the GUE requires internships.
From my dealings with GUE, their instructor development and management is first rate; something that other agencies should aspire to.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/teric/
http://cavediveflorida.com/Rum_House.htm

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