I want to have a more in depth look at some of the processes we employ teaching learner drivers.

To become a Coach we need three things, a way of being, a coaching process and a set of coaching skills. In articles that will follow I will go into these three things in depth, but this short article is designed to set the scene so to speak. We cannot use pure coaching from the executive coaching world as we have safety critical issues we need to be cognisant of. So in essence client Centred Learning is one step back from pure coaching, allowing us some input with regard to safety critical issues.

Why not just stick with what we have always done – it works!

Traditional instruction does work, but it isn’t as effective as client centred learning done well. The learning is deepended and strengthened as a result. People learn best when they are totally involved in and driving the learning process (pun intended). Ability is not something you can easily absorb in a passive manner, it really is something you need to develop by experiencing things, reflecting upon that experience, deciding what worked and what didn’t, then putting together a new plan with different things to experience, and executing that plan.

Client centred learning is a powerful way of tapping into the hard wiring of how people learn, Timothy Gallwey in his work developing the methods that led to him writing “the inner game of tennis” discovered that it was experience and not the trainer that was doing  the teaching. That in fact he got in the way with his instructions and directions, these simply served to confuse the learner, filling their mind with lists of things to remember.

Too many instructors focus too much attention on telling their students what to do (this is the way they were trained to to the job), what to think and why they got it wrong. This approach only fosters dependency, doubt and blind obedience. This method of learning is not only slower it does little to develop the individuals skills and knowledge, or as a person.

A client centred approach helps the coach to involve the learner in the process by putting them at the centre of everything.  Client centred methods are designed to foster self-reliance, confidence and responsibility. This is achieved by helping the learner to think for themselves and to develop ways of learning that work specifically for them. Your job as the coach is to enable this through careful questioning, listening and coaching conversations, to take them where they need to go, to facilitate learning.

The reality is you cannot put learning in, you must coax it out. This cannot be achieved by “instructing” you must be able to create sessions that allow the learner as much autonomy as is safe,  and by using discovery learning with self determination, reflection and evaluation you will help them to reach their goals in a reasonable time frame and in a fulfilling way. Your job is not to make that happen but to create the right environment for it to occur.

“My learners can’t do that!”

This is the cry of the many driving instructors, they feel that without input from the instructor that nothing can happen. This is of course, absolute nonsense, nobody arrives in your car with no life experience. They come to you with a “map of the world” which has been built up over at least 16 or 17 years, even before they could walk and talk they were observing the world around them. These people have massive potential, after all, who taught them to walk and talk? Possibly the two hardest things to learn. If they can do that themselves they can drive a car with a little help and guidance from you. 

We must realise though that just because you are full of knowledge and tips and tricks, it is not always helpful to try to fill the learner up with them. The reality is you cannot put learning in, you must coax it out. This cannot be achieved by “instructing” you must be able to facilitate learning by creating the right relationship and having the right conversations.

Small easy steps

We learn best when we are taking the right sized steps, if we are taking too big a step then safety is inevitably compromised. Your job as the coach is to help the learner formulate plans to take them along their chosen learning path that keep them safe. It serves no purpose having to jump in and take control all the time, learning is stifled when this occurs. Any programme of learning should be structured to optimise learning.

Our ability to learn is always influenced by what we already know and are capable of. It is much easier to learn something new that incorporates similar elements or principles to something already learnt. Therefore if you are careful that your learning is in small logical steps the learning will be much quicker, deeper and more powerful. 

How each session should work                
Any practical training session should have a distinct beginning, middle and end. It is important the learner is at the heart of the process and the coach should help them formulate their own session plans wherever possible. They may be reluctant to begin with for many reasons but if we continually apply a solid equal relationship and nurturing approach they will eventually enjoy it and want to take part.

The beginning 

The beginning should start with establishing where the learner is in their development now. Your own pupils will have filled in a reflective log from their last session and will have arrived with a plan of what they want to do today, how they want to do it, what sort of route they need and an idea of how they will measure if session was successful or not. 

What of the student who doesn’t have this in place? This would be a student you have never met before or someone who is having their first lesson after a break or someone on an assessment session.

Ask what the learner thinks they have done in previous lessons that may help with today’s lesson, what sort of route do they think they need, how they will measure success, and how would they like you to conduct the session. 

They may say something like “my last instructor used to give me a brief using his presenter, then he would talk me through it and gradually help me less and less until I could do it on my own” Ask if they would like today’s session conducted in that manner, they may say they didn’t know there were other ways of doing it, at which point you may offer suggestions, but they may also just say yes I would like it that way.

You must involve every learner sat beside you in this way, no matter who they are and what previous experience they have. In this way we can ensure we are helping to get learning out rather than put learning in and that the learner is involved in an active way.

The middle 

The middle of the session is where the bulk of the learning happens as we experience things and reflect upon them. You start by embarking upon your learners first learning goal or step.  Every step in the session should have a purpose and therefore a goal to be achieved. After the first attempt it is important to have the learner reflect, how was that? or how did that feel? it is important that we deal with how the learner thinks it was. Traditional approach of the instructor telling them what they did right and what they didn’t is actually counterproductive and only serves to make the learner try to give you answers they feel that you want from them.

The next goal might be more specific to the main purpose of the session and take several steps to achieve. Each learning task or activity might be repeated several times until they have achieved the goal or outcome they were looking for.

The end of the session

The end of the session is where you have the learner assess what has been achieved and how they feel the session went. Marking targets in workbooks if such things are available, or perhaps scaling themselves by giving a number to where they think they are on a scale of one to ten, it is most important that you do not correct their score or indeed give your score as this only serves to reinforce a hierarchy  (present in traditional instruction) which is less than helpful.

In particular it is important that you help them to set a provisional plan for the next session in light of what was achieved during the current session and consider what preparation they might engage in prior to the next session.

After Session reflective process 

This is where the learner reflects on how the learning is going – what targets they achieved, what went well, what surprised them, how they would rate the outcome of their session and what aspects of their performance they would like to feel better about. This will help them finalise what they would really like to do on the next session, and therefore what preparation might be useful.