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.
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