When you first enter the industry as a driving instructor it is natural to assume that the key skills you need to possess include patience, calmness, understanding, empathy and reassurance and let�s throw in a dollop of sense of humour as well, that always goes down well. Undoubtedly having these skills in your armoury can do you no harm but what you really need to understand is where you fit into the bigger picture, because that will NOT be quite so apparent.
You will realise quite quickly that there is more to the job of a driving instructor than developing the skills, techniques and knowledge that makes a safe driver. In all walks of life we can focus our attention and efforts to achieve a particular goal but that does not in itself lead to permanence in our behaviours. Driving instruction is no different. Our education system places a heavy bias on exam results, but that is not necessarily resulting in well rounded, confident young adults equipped to deal with all the challenges soon to come their way. And what you are going to discover as a newly qualified driving instructor is that there will equally be a heavy bias on passing the driving test. The pupil(s) sat next to you, quite naturally has one thing in their mind, passing the driving test as soon as possible. They are not interested in developing skills to aid anticipation of hazards, assessing driving conditions, reflecting on decisions they make as a driver, considering personal strengths/weaknesses for given situations. They are interested in your pass rate, how quickly you take people to test, the test routes, how long it takes to book a test and if they fail when can they take another test.
Our DVSA driving standards are designed to offer a guiding light in the thoroughness of our training. They do not mention about driving tests and neither should we to our pupils. Recently a driving instructor commented on a forum that everyone should calm down about their concerns regarding the new law for taking learners on to motorways; motorway driving is not on the test, we should feel no obligation to cover it in our training, in his opinion. This is a person who appears to be training pupils to pass driving tests. One of the problems with this approach is in the permanence of the learning. Students who learn to pass exams have limited retention of knowledge beyond the exam; they have after all only temporarily retained the knowledge to pass the exam, what is the point in retaining it for any longer? Equally, one could argue what is the point in learning ANYTHING that is not going to be asked in the exam? The same goes for our pupils who learn how to pass a driving test, once that goal is achieved, that knowledge is also disposed of under the �no longer required� category. This IS why the driving behaviour of newly qualified drivers is having to be further monitored by the use of �black box� telematics. It is an attempt to re-name that newly acquired knowledge into the category of �Temporary hold� rather than �no longer required�.
As professionals in the industry we have a duty to act like professionals and work to driving standards rather than the standard required to pass driving tests. If you train a pupil to make a certain observation at a given moment in time in order to pass a test, do you honestly think that pupil is going to continue making that observation after they pass the test? Do you intend to offer to assist pupils navigating up and down multi-storey car parks, dealing safely with breakdowns, managing in-car technology, handling a group of excited passenger friends in the car?
Passing of the driving test is a natural by-product of good driving training. Your younger pupils may not be too willing to hear that to begin with. They may have any number of very real obstacles to learning to drive, obstacles that simply cannot be ignored in order to develop a safe driver but that does not necessarily mean that THEY will recognise that fact. Some pupils will need guidance in appreciating unrealistic expectations as they may not be too experienced in that so far in their life. An educational factory that is bending over backwards to condition students to take exams does not develop an understanding of what real, practical, meaningful learning actually looks like. Managing obstacles to learning simply comes in the form of re-taking of tests repeatedly. There is no need to develop a responsibility for what any learning actually means to you as a student when you are simply being encouraged to regurgitate knowledge in the short-term. As all of us know only too well, if we don�t feel a sense of �owning� our involvement in something, then the outcome is �out of our hands�. As a newly qualified driving instructor, if you can develop a relationship with your pupil so that they can sense they very much are in control of outcomes then that is certainly heading towards �safe driving�. A student who fails exams can re-sit it or even the entire year but consider what failure means to our driving pupils. It is the easiest thing in the world to teach a pupil to pass a driving test, but if they then go on to have accidents, feel unconfident to drive, can�t afford the insurance then really, what value have you added? All of us driving instructors can look the other way with this, pretend it is not happening, but all the evidence out there is suggesting that many of our pupils are being seriously let down by our unprofessional approach to learning to drive.
Post a Comment