Driving behaviour

A limitation of the “instructor led” approach to learning is that it is set within a pre-determined environment of parent – child.  Parents on private driving lessons will do anything and everything possible for the good of their child, and that unwavering emotion often leads them to be “blind” as to how they are ‘suffocating them in love’.   Unwittingly they prevent their child from even contemplating risks let alone taking risks or considering how they can manage risk.  Similarly, a driving instructor who is controlling everything in a learning environment is robbing their pupils of responsibility, ownership, rational thinking, considering probabilities, imagining outcomes, discovering ability, controlling parameters, identifying success measures and possible impacts to safety.  A parent does all this in the name of love, but a driving instructor does it in the name of laziness; it is far easier to tell a pupil what to do, rather than assist them in developing key skills.  But the real point is that sooner or later, once that driving test is passed, that pupil joins the public roads whether they have the necessary thinking skills for sustaining road safety…… or not.  Their feelings, thoughts and beliefs are coming on the roads, and their deep seated unconscious attitudes (perhaps yet to even surface) will be joining them too.  They and we have no choice in this fact.  So in effect there are two factors that will be affecting their driving behaviours: the first is very much within their own self and the other is related to the environment in which they are in as they drive.

The problem with the “instructor led” approach to driving training is that the environment they learnt to drive in bears no similarity at all with the environment in which they drive independently in.  They have in effect been trained within a sterile, unrealistic learning environment that has no benefit to them because their behaviour will be entirely different when they are in their own driving environment.   And if that were not enough, while they were ‘trained’ in that sterile, unrealistic learning environment, they were deliberately restricted from learning in any personally meaningful way.  They were not given the chance to discover many personal characteristics relating to their strengths/weaknesses in practical or cognitive skills for being a driver.  Cosmic.  They may as well have been trained by their Parents!

When you set up your new driving school car once you have qualified as a driving instructor (sounds good eh?), get yourself an additional mirror for your windscreen that is set only on the pupils face (it means you do not have to turn your head to look at them which is not just practically easier for you, but also less overbearing for your pupil).  When they have been with you for a while, take a mental ‘timeout’ from the session, and for 10 minutes, silently, with no notice given to your pupil, concentrate on what their eyes do when they drive.  Focus on the eyes.  They will have already been given all your words of wisdom on the whats, wheres, hows and whys of effective observations, just take a few minutes to specifically and thoroughly assess if their eyes are working in a methodical, systematic, logical fashion.  It will be time well spent.  Because while you have unexpectedly remained entirely silent for 10 minutes, you have allowed your pupil to lose themselves in their thoughts, and you have just caught a glimpse of the actual environment in which your pupil will be driving when alone.   This is a sample of what observations you can reasonably expect the pupil to make when they drive alone without the distractions of emotions, music, fatigue, drugs, mobile phones, friends, make up, eating, being lost etc.  It will either cut the mustard or it wont and you should be very clear about that because the obs aren’t going to magically improve post-test.  I have achieved this same goal by filming a training session (with your pupils consent of course) and providing them with the footage that demonstrates sound methodology to obs….. or not.  I mention this because we humans being as defensive and proud as we are, will instinctively deny or disbelieve your assessment if it is not recorded!

My point of this blog is to highlight that their future driving behaviour is going to come down to what their mind/body brings to the car, AS WELL AS the particular environment within and surrounding that car at the time.  It is in this context that you start to appreciate how ineffective “instructor led” training is to our pupils and why it really should be banished from our industry yesterday.

Tom Ingram provides payg driving training for trainee driving instructors 0775 607 1464