Does your agency prevent you from teaching better?
Does your training agency allow you the flexibility to structure your training to best meet your customers’ unique needs? At least one agency tells its instructors they may only do certain skills on certain dives. However, this can easily interfere with the ability to offer the best courses possible. Here is an example of what we mean.
Teaching in surf and sun
A friend of ours spent ten years teaching scuba in Southern California. He would do his first day of open-water training off the beach in Laguna and the second day off Casino Point on Catalina Island.
The first day of training gave students experience in surf entries, longer surface swims and diving in and around kelp. But there was a downside, too.
In the shallow water off the beach, even modest waves passing overhead resulted in substantial surge. You could not gather students around you to practice skills without the entire group being violently shoved back and forth.
This is not exactly conducive to skill practice — although it did allow students to learn how to swim underwater while dealing with the constant push and pull of the waves passing overhead.
In contrast, conditions at Casino Point provided a perfect opportunity for skill practice. There was a rocky bottom, no surge and no current.
Had our friend been constrained by training standards that required he do a certain set of skills on dives 1 and 2, it would have hampered students’ ability to learn rather than enhanced it.
Fortunately, our friend wasn’t bound by that agency’s standards. As a result, his students had a much better learning experience.
Bordering on the absurd
Nearly every training agency sells cue cards with a suggested sequence for conducting skills across a series of confined- and open-water dives. Yet, in only one case do we know of this being mandatory. And the results can border on ridiculous.
We once heard one of that agency’s Course Directors ask his instructor candidates what they should do if, during an open-water dive in which one of the required skills was a partial mask clear, a student should mistakenly remove, replace and clear his mask.
According to the Course Director, because the stated performance objective required by standards was to “clear a partially flooded mask,” the student should be made to repeat the skill, this time with just a half-filled mask.
Seriously, how stupid can you get?
We don’t know whether or not the Course Director’s statement reflected official training agency policy, but it means that either:
- The training agency did a poor job in educating its instructor trainers, or…
- Both the Course Director and the agency are equally nuts.
Whose customers are they?
If you ask the training agency in question why they mandate when, where and how instructors must conduct skills, you will likely be told it’s for two reasons.
- It prevents students from being forced to perform a skill before they are ready.
- It helps ensure a high level of consistency from one instructor to the next.
The first point might make a certain amount of sense in situations where students are doing their open-water training in cold, murky water. Under those circumstances, easing into something like mask clearing might be wise.
But what about students doing their open-water training in clear, warm water? Bear in mind students are supposed to be comfortable and confident in all required skills before progressing to open water. So when and where they do these skills shouldn’t matter.
Regarding quality and consistency, does rigidly adhering to a certain skill sequence help ensure this? No, it doesn’t. As long as students demonstrate mastery of all required skills, it shouldn’t matter when and where they do them.
So, what is really going on here? If you conduct skills when and where your agency says you must and record this in the training record section of the students’ logbooks, your students are now free to jump ship to another dive center or resort whenever they wish. And you will never know what became of them.
Perhaps the best example of this is open-water training referrals.
With SDI, you send students off to a resort or other referral center with a copy of their training record and other paperwork. The referral center completes the students’ dives, signs off on the student record, and returns it to you. You then issue the certification card.
What remains clear is that you are merely “lending” your customers to the referral center. But they remain your customers.
With that other agency, the referral center issues the certification card. You may not even know that this has happened.
The underlying principle is that the students you teach don’t belong to you; they belong to the training agency. This is why the agency structures its standards to make it easy for students to jump from one dive center or resort to the next.
Is this really what you want?
If you want the freedom to structure your classes in ways that best reflect environmental conditions and individual student needs, don’t stay with an agency that feels the students you teach actually belong to them. Break free and come over to SDI. We’ll help you train better students and make teaching fun again.