Small Boat Prep

helping each other out

The Aim of the event was as follows:

“To give an opportunity for potential National Instructors to demonstrate in a non examination environment to an instructional team consisting of experienced National Instructors their individual leadership, organisational and teaching skills. It is also an opportunity to build and rapport with their fellow students and the instructor team. An opportunity prior to the NI exam to give and obtain coaching and receive focused feedback.”

The Assessment Areas applicable:

Planning and Organisation of Boat dives
Marshalling and Management of Boat Diving Operations

6. Boat Dive with an Instructional Purpose

7. Instructional Feedback-5 Minute Lesson

8. Task-related Coaching Boat Dive

9. Surface Teaching

10. Coaching and Mentoring

21. Personal Diving Skills

22. Diving Knowledge

23. Attitude.

Saturday 16th June 2007

Day One of the Small Boat Prep session was focused on individual instruction boat dives such as we might teach on an Advanced Instructor Course. The important thing is to look at this from the perspective of ‘teaching how to teach’ rather than just teaching the skills. It is very easy to fall into this trap!

It is also important to look for other relevant teaching opportunities through out the day, for example teaching the various aspects of the planning sessions, the dive management, the loading of the boats and the launching, boat handling skills and so on.

My first dive of the rather overcast day was with Duncan Locke on the wreck of the Missouri in Porthdafarch Bay. I’m told there was a wreck there, however we didn’t see it. Not because we missed the site, but because the visibility was so bad we couldn’t actually see anything at all!

I had approached this dive as ‘First Wreck Dive’ and trying to think about it from an Instructor Trainer role had taken Duncan through a short planning session on the boat thinking about what skills we could teach, the Essential Criteria (STEP) on the lesson and planning our SEEDS brief. We had a good plan bursting with loads of great skills to teach on our first wreck dive.…that is until we arrived on the wreck and I quickly realised it would be impossible to teach anything as Duncan could not even see me never mind see my demonstrations. We did a quick reel out exercise and hoped things might improve away from the shotline however this proved not to be the case and so, being adaptable instructors, we ascended the shotline to 9m where the viz dramatically improved to just plain poor and taught midwater DSMB salvaging at least something from the dive. A quick debrief and we then ran through our Instructor Trainer debrief bringing out the elements of the Essential Criteria and various teaching points from the dive.

For Dive Two I was buddied up with Maggie and we took a very similar approach to the lesson on the wreck of the Editor, however this time we did it as a ‘First Boat Dive’. Fortunately the viz was considerably better on this and we actually had a very pleasant dive where we could actually see stuff, including a great many blennies and a rather impressive spider crab and large anchor. As with the first dive, I felt it went ‘OK’ from an instruction point of view but could be greatly improved with a bit more thought and prior planning.

The tricky thing at this level is to be thinking with your Instructor Trainer hat on and ‘top-and-tail’ your lessons and also try to bring out all the instructional points through out the dive.

I think we all found it is not something where you can just ‘wing-it’. It takes a lot of preparation, thinking about where the teaching points are in advance where you can and also being able to spot others as they arise and bring them out. For this reason, these prep sessions are invaluable to anyone considering National Instructor as it shows you what areas you need to work on as well as the multitude of valuable little tips, tricks and gems passed on by the NI’s who so generously give their time to help us on these events.

A good fun days diving and a great many lessons learnt.

Dave

Saturday 16th June 2007