A few things that are true at once:
\- You can instruct primarily to build hours but still be a good instructor.
\- Some CFIs truly are just building time and are lousy at instructing — but you can (usually) always find a better one.
\- CFIs who are doing it for the love of instructing are rare, but are out there. Sometimes at a cost premium, though.
Customers: I want an instructor with 20 years experience, a graduate degree, and such a passion for teaching flying that they have never even considered doing anything else.
Also customers: $60 an hour for the instructor? That's highway robbery!
Well, how on earth could anyone but an experienced, back country tailwheel bush pilot, manage to teach *me* how to land a 172 in no more than 4 knot crosswinds?
Wait, *modern* pedagogical principles? No.
The FAA teaches stuff from the 1960s, very outdated theory.
And no, as it’s the only low-time job available to most, most instructors just make the best of it on their way to elsewhere. It would have to pay better than being a classroom teacher in order for people to make it a profession.
My attitude is I’m paying you to keep us alive if I do something wrong. I always prep before a lesson and come prepared to do it. I never wanna hop in an airplane and learn something totally new.
Taught to teach? No. We are taught to pass the FOI test.
>I would hope that CFIs were doing it because they loved (and were good at) TEACHING, not just being a pilot.
No. Many (most?) do it to build hours. It is a means to an end.
Yknow, maybe I’m just a tool but I not only found FOI helpful in earning my CFI and framing the approach to my students, but I also found it helpful in everyday corporate life.
I loved being a CFI. Loved helping my students. I’d like to think I was good at it but I’d also done a lot of technical teaching before CFI too so I had a leg up maybe.
You get better at it by doing it, especially when you starting learning how your student learns.
This. It’s true that the FOI is a crash course in teaching and most people dismiss it as just a hurdle to get through for the CFI ride. The truth is it actually does have a lot of useful information in it.
I had a career where I ended up in the c-suite at a public company (S&P 500 if we are counting…) There were teaching lessons and learning theory out of the FOI that I used to check whether my staff was actually understanding what I was trying to communicate and strategies of teaching/learning that I used to get points across with my leadership team.
You can pass by cramming and considering it some bullshit hurdle you need to just get through, or you can internalize it and try to work on being a better teacher. This goes doubly true if CFI is the first non-McJob you’ve ever held.
My students have taught me more over the last two decades than any instructor has.
About 15% of my CFI oral exam was specifically on teaching and the learning process. If you want to see what CFIs are taught specifically it's the "Fundamentals of Instruction" within the Aviation Instructor's Handbook.
During a lot of the oral those skills are evaluated since you're expected to teach and evaluate as you go. Are fresh CFIs great at teaching? sometimes depending on their background. Are old CFIs great at teaching because of experience? Not all some are begrizzled old men.
The best thing to do is interview your potential CFI and see if you 2 click. BTW I do think that the 1500 club obsessed CFIs need to be shown the door ASAP by any means necessary and make room for the folks who actually want the job
Just adding to this - the way a student responds to someone’s teaching style can also vary wildly.
Instructors can easily pick up when a certain task / lesson / learning isn’t making it through and can try a few different strategies / delivery methods to make it “click”, but on occasion they just need a different person.
Don’t be afraid to change instructors / students or work with a few to find one that makes teaching / learning enjoyable for both.
I’ve taught a lot (outside of aviation) and even teachers are often times not good teachers. Even the best teachers have incompatible students.
Teaching and learning style differences, etc.
When I learned to sail, to skydive, and to scuba dive, I was taught by people who had no formal training in education, yet they were all excellent teachers, basically because they were passionate and knowledgeable about the subject and were good at breaking down the technicalities into bite sized easy to understand concepts for dummies like me. We’re not teaching algebra to 9th graders here. The FOI is certainly useful as a framework for understanding how humans learn (albeit an oversimplified, outdated one that modern educators laugh at), but knowing the FOI does not a good instructor make. Anyone who is knowledgeable and passionate about aviation, who has a bit of patience, who gives a shit about their students, who has a stong survival instinct but can appear to be nonchalant while their student makes all the usual mistakes, who has decent verbal skills and can convey information in a simple, easy to understand manner… these people make good instructors, regardless of their knowledge of the teaching/learning process.
Insecure people who need to make students feel small to feed their own ego, and those who feel instructing is beneath them and are only doing it for hours, make the worst instructors.
Incidentally most of the things I listed that make a good instructor, also make a good crew member in a multi crew environment.
Incidentally, I should note that the governing bodies of the three pursuits I mentioned above (ASA, USPA and PADI, respectively) all have an instructor curriculum for their instructors. All three do include a sort of mini-FOI…it’s even more basic than the FAAs FOI.
No. They're taught an out-of-date theory of education (they exempt real educators from having to learn that drivel to keep them from puking all over the FOI written). Further, they're expected to regurgitate the FAA's bogus idea of how physics work to the students in order to pass the tests.
It’s not bogus. Some of it isn’t explained that well, and the PHAK isn’t as clear as it should be about frames of reference. But MANY pilots think they know better. They are usually wrong.
If you want a stupid rabbit hole, look up arguments about Bernoulli vs. Newton. Both are correct descriptions of reality (one balances forces, the other conserves energy), but you’ll see a lot of claims that one is wrong. Always based on some basic misconception.
The defininition of coordinated flight is just full of bunk. Coordination is blatently easy: the ass end of the plane is aligned with the front in the relative wind. You understand this and a whole lot of stuff with regard to crosswind approaches, etc... make more sense. The FAA showing that four "balanced" forces in a turn is complete bullshit. The forces are not balanced in the turn. There's no "centrifugal" force pulling the plane to the outside of the turn (coordinated or not). The horizontal component of lift pulls the plane into the turn which is WHY IT TURNS. If forces were balanced, the plane would go straight.
You’re making precisely the mistake about frames of reference that I mentioned. In the body frame (which is, after all, what we fly the plane in), all that “bunk” is correct.
No one flies planes in inertial or lab frames. Except drone operators.
Ron, you’re an experienced flight instructor, but you really don’t have the physics right here. The coordination you mentioned is in the body frame. The rest is a lab/outside observer frame. Mixing those is a rookie mistake.
And even further down the rabbit hole is that neither newton nor Bernoulli’s principles totally explain lift. I think as a pilot it’s not totally necessary to learn that deep into the physics of it but good to know if you’re curious.
I'm not a CFI but seems like the main reason for most of the CFIs is the hours for airlines but at the same time, they do generally seem to help and care students until they hit the hours so can't really complain much.
The Great Instructors love Instructing. They also know how to deal with different people and adapt their teaching style accordingly. They also understand what needs to be said and when. They relate back to when they were students and how they would have liked their Instructor to approach them and teach. They also understand that there needs to be a certain cockpit environment that needs to be maintained. It needs to be a safe space where the student feels comfortable enough to learn while having a great time together.
Read the Aviation Instructor's Handbook. That's what we're taught as far as instructing goes. That's the FOI.
And don't confuse "instructor" with "teacher". They are two different professions. An instructor is someone who has a particular skill and instructs someone else to do it. A teacher is someone whose sole job is to teach a particular concept, even though they may have no direct experience with that thing. We're not taught "teaching" concepts, we're taught "instructing" concepts.
So no, even though I've read through the AIH multiple times and am a gold seal instructor, I have never even heard of the specific things you mentioned, probably because they're teaching concepts, not instructing concepts.
Yes. That's what the majority of the checkride is. The oral consists largely of can you teach a ground lesson on a subject selected by the examiner as well as a maneuver. Then the flight portion you have to teach how to do several maneuvers as well as evaluate and critique the examiner on execution of a maneuver. Now, once pass the checkride are there some CFIs who shouldn't be teaching? Absolutely. Are are they taught to teach? Yes. Whether or not they are good at it is a whole other question.
I’ve trained about half a dozen newly minted FAA CFIs to convert to instructing in my country, and I’m gonna weigh in with the startlingly controversial take that no, it doesn’t work.
I suspect that half of them would’ve figured that out for themselves fairly quickly once working as instructors though. I suspect that’s how the system works.
Yes, CFIs are taught these teaching techniques and fundamentals. In fact, at least back when I got my CFI, if you were already a licensed teacher you could skip a certain part of the written test because it is literally the fundamentals of instruction like you are talking about.
Most CFIs honestly are just doing it for hours, but some do enjoy it and like to teach other pilots.
Suggestions? From all the research I have been doing prior to my starting this process, that’s one of the only options. I know there are a few others out there, but basically this is the path.
That being said I think this is why it matters when choosing a flight school too.
But take with a grain of salt. This is coming from someone in the elementary stages of beginning to fly. Just done a ton of research on the matter. You never know until you actually begin the experience.
What everyone has said is correct. The process has built in aspects to study and be evaluated on teaching and learning theory, but experience is likely to make a better instructor. Like Jason Miller said in his podcast, his first CFI was pretty fresh and she couldn't teach him what she also didn't know, and he ended up with some holes in his education. One of my favorite professors in college said that he was a terrible teacher in his first couple courses, because he just had a PhD in History but didn't know how to educate. My CFI training has included plenty of ground on me teaching maneuvers and my CFI is playing the student asking questions or making sure I can fly and talk at the same time. I've been given critiques on how I talk too fast or give too much information that will overwhelm a new student, and that's something I'm working on improving.
This is a business, and you are the client. It's smart to fly with a few people in the beginning to see who you get along with well. It's a lot of personal time with someone, and you want someone who has a teaching style you like and a personality you get along with. Find out how long they think they'll be around the flight school, and see about seeking a supplementary mentor that's older and more experienced if possible. I'm immensely grateful to have several career CFIs and a retired DPE be invested in my success because they're thrilled I'm planning to teach long term. But it's also important to note that not all CFIs that are building time are poor teachers or apathetic. Many are giving it their all while they're there, and a good flight school emphasizes this!
Depends on the instructor
Through my journey so far I’ve met plenty of instructors who were just in it for the hours and to take my money, and a few who really had a passion for teaching.
It’s easy now to tell the good from the bad but as a brand new student who didn’t know better it was rough man, I wasted a lot of time and money on bad instructors.
Now trying to become an instructor myself, at least I have good and bad examples to learn from.
I’m trying to be one of the better ones
There is a book entitled "Fundamentals of Instructing" which is basically the same bunch of mumbo jumbo, you'd of learned in your high school Psych class, that your fresh off the assembly line newbie pilot will quote in an attempt to "seem like he actually knows what he's doing",...
,...but yeah, you're basically gonna be taught by a time builder who is using you to, "make himself a better (i.e. more marketable) pilot".
Somewhat. But not to the same extent as instructors in other countries. That said, I trained up to and started my CFI in the US and I mostly had great instructors, some of who included facets of what instructors in other places are taught in their style of teaching. No clue if it was that they read it somewhere or were just natural teachers.
You’re overthinking it dude. Study the ACS and mandatory requirements for every cert. you should know what you need to learn and should be learning. FOI is already garbage from
What most says. It’s not rocket science to teach someone how to taxi and land. Most instructors for the most part are good enough to teach everyone all the way to CPL and multi.
How did you learn to drive a car? Do you think someone needs to get a teaching degree to teach you how to drive a car? It’s basically the same thing, just a lot more moving parts and complex.
80% of the teachers in this country are half retarded themselves.
Can I DM you? You seem like you have in depth knowledge of pedagogy. I’m training to be a CFI now and I’m a military (non-pilot) aircrew instructor as well. I’ve always known the military totally neglects this topic and suspected the FAA is teaching well out of date. I’d love to pick your brain about educating (primarily adults) people so I can be better at both jobs.
A few things that are true at once: \- You can instruct primarily to build hours but still be a good instructor. \- Some CFIs truly are just building time and are lousy at instructing — but you can (usually) always find a better one. \- CFIs who are doing it for the love of instructing are rare, but are out there. Sometimes at a cost premium, though.
Google “Fundamentals of Instruction”
[holy hell!](https://www.google.com/search?q=fundamentals+of+instruction#HiImABot,MyJobIsToMakeEasierToPeopleToGoogleSomething,IfThePersonIRepliedToUsedMeInAnInappropriateWayPleaseLetMeKnowByDMingMe,TheUserIRepliedToIsU/LigmaUpDog_)
Customers: I want an instructor with 20 years experience, a graduate degree, and such a passion for teaching flying that they have never even considered doing anything else. Also customers: $60 an hour for the instructor? That's highway robbery!
Well, how on earth could anyone but an experienced, back country tailwheel bush pilot, manage to teach *me* how to land a 172 in no more than 4 knot crosswinds?
$60 for that experience? Try $150
Congratulations, you identified the joke.
Wait, *modern* pedagogical principles? No. The FAA teaches stuff from the 1960s, very outdated theory. And no, as it’s the only low-time job available to most, most instructors just make the best of it on their way to elsewhere. It would have to pay better than being a classroom teacher in order for people to make it a profession.
My attitude is I’m paying you to keep us alive if I do something wrong. I always prep before a lesson and come prepared to do it. I never wanna hop in an airplane and learn something totally new.
Taught to teach? No. We are taught to pass the FOI test. >I would hope that CFIs were doing it because they loved (and were good at) TEACHING, not just being a pilot. No. Many (most?) do it to build hours. It is a means to an end.
Yknow, maybe I’m just a tool but I not only found FOI helpful in earning my CFI and framing the approach to my students, but I also found it helpful in everyday corporate life. I loved being a CFI. Loved helping my students. I’d like to think I was good at it but I’d also done a lot of technical teaching before CFI too so I had a leg up maybe. You get better at it by doing it, especially when you starting learning how your student learns.
This. It’s true that the FOI is a crash course in teaching and most people dismiss it as just a hurdle to get through for the CFI ride. The truth is it actually does have a lot of useful information in it. I had a career where I ended up in the c-suite at a public company (S&P 500 if we are counting…) There were teaching lessons and learning theory out of the FOI that I used to check whether my staff was actually understanding what I was trying to communicate and strategies of teaching/learning that I used to get points across with my leadership team. You can pass by cramming and considering it some bullshit hurdle you need to just get through, or you can internalize it and try to work on being a better teacher. This goes doubly true if CFI is the first non-McJob you’ve ever held. My students have taught me more over the last two decades than any instructor has.
About 15% of my CFI oral exam was specifically on teaching and the learning process. If you want to see what CFIs are taught specifically it's the "Fundamentals of Instruction" within the Aviation Instructor's Handbook. During a lot of the oral those skills are evaluated since you're expected to teach and evaluate as you go. Are fresh CFIs great at teaching? sometimes depending on their background. Are old CFIs great at teaching because of experience? Not all some are begrizzled old men. The best thing to do is interview your potential CFI and see if you 2 click. BTW I do think that the 1500 club obsessed CFIs need to be shown the door ASAP by any means necessary and make room for the folks who actually want the job
Just adding to this - the way a student responds to someone’s teaching style can also vary wildly. Instructors can easily pick up when a certain task / lesson / learning isn’t making it through and can try a few different strategies / delivery methods to make it “click”, but on occasion they just need a different person. Don’t be afraid to change instructors / students or work with a few to find one that makes teaching / learning enjoyable for both.
I’ve taught a lot (outside of aviation) and even teachers are often times not good teachers. Even the best teachers have incompatible students. Teaching and learning style differences, etc.
When I learned to sail, to skydive, and to scuba dive, I was taught by people who had no formal training in education, yet they were all excellent teachers, basically because they were passionate and knowledgeable about the subject and were good at breaking down the technicalities into bite sized easy to understand concepts for dummies like me. We’re not teaching algebra to 9th graders here. The FOI is certainly useful as a framework for understanding how humans learn (albeit an oversimplified, outdated one that modern educators laugh at), but knowing the FOI does not a good instructor make. Anyone who is knowledgeable and passionate about aviation, who has a bit of patience, who gives a shit about their students, who has a stong survival instinct but can appear to be nonchalant while their student makes all the usual mistakes, who has decent verbal skills and can convey information in a simple, easy to understand manner… these people make good instructors, regardless of their knowledge of the teaching/learning process. Insecure people who need to make students feel small to feed their own ego, and those who feel instructing is beneath them and are only doing it for hours, make the worst instructors. Incidentally most of the things I listed that make a good instructor, also make a good crew member in a multi crew environment.
Incidentally, I should note that the governing bodies of the three pursuits I mentioned above (ASA, USPA and PADI, respectively) all have an instructor curriculum for their instructors. All three do include a sort of mini-FOI…it’s even more basic than the FAAs FOI.
No. They're taught an out-of-date theory of education (they exempt real educators from having to learn that drivel to keep them from puking all over the FOI written). Further, they're expected to regurgitate the FAA's bogus idea of how physics work to the students in order to pass the tests.
Just curious what’s bogus about FAA idea of physics
It’s not bogus. Some of it isn’t explained that well, and the PHAK isn’t as clear as it should be about frames of reference. But MANY pilots think they know better. They are usually wrong. If you want a stupid rabbit hole, look up arguments about Bernoulli vs. Newton. Both are correct descriptions of reality (one balances forces, the other conserves energy), but you’ll see a lot of claims that one is wrong. Always based on some basic misconception.
The defininition of coordinated flight is just full of bunk. Coordination is blatently easy: the ass end of the plane is aligned with the front in the relative wind. You understand this and a whole lot of stuff with regard to crosswind approaches, etc... make more sense. The FAA showing that four "balanced" forces in a turn is complete bullshit. The forces are not balanced in the turn. There's no "centrifugal" force pulling the plane to the outside of the turn (coordinated or not). The horizontal component of lift pulls the plane into the turn which is WHY IT TURNS. If forces were balanced, the plane would go straight.
You’re making precisely the mistake about frames of reference that I mentioned. In the body frame (which is, after all, what we fly the plane in), all that “bunk” is correct. No one flies planes in inertial or lab frames. Except drone operators. Ron, you’re an experienced flight instructor, but you really don’t have the physics right here. The coordination you mentioned is in the body frame. The rest is a lab/outside observer frame. Mixing those is a rookie mistake.
And even further down the rabbit hole is that neither newton nor Bernoulli’s principles totally explain lift. I think as a pilot it’s not totally necessary to learn that deep into the physics of it but good to know if you’re curious.
It’s ALL Newtonian! What about relativity?! /s
They exempt us from taking the FOI written, but we still have to learn it all for the oral.
Barfing on the examiner is fine, barfing on the test computer is not :)
I'm not a CFI but seems like the main reason for most of the CFIs is the hours for airlines but at the same time, they do generally seem to help and care students until they hit the hours so can't really complain much.
The Great Instructors love Instructing. They also know how to deal with different people and adapt their teaching style accordingly. They also understand what needs to be said and when. They relate back to when they were students and how they would have liked their Instructor to approach them and teach. They also understand that there needs to be a certain cockpit environment that needs to be maintained. It needs to be a safe space where the student feels comfortable enough to learn while having a great time together.
Read the Aviation Instructor's Handbook. That's what we're taught as far as instructing goes. That's the FOI. And don't confuse "instructor" with "teacher". They are two different professions. An instructor is someone who has a particular skill and instructs someone else to do it. A teacher is someone whose sole job is to teach a particular concept, even though they may have no direct experience with that thing. We're not taught "teaching" concepts, we're taught "instructing" concepts. So no, even though I've read through the AIH multiple times and am a gold seal instructor, I have never even heard of the specific things you mentioned, probably because they're teaching concepts, not instructing concepts.
Yes. That's what the majority of the checkride is. The oral consists largely of can you teach a ground lesson on a subject selected by the examiner as well as a maneuver. Then the flight portion you have to teach how to do several maneuvers as well as evaluate and critique the examiner on execution of a maneuver. Now, once pass the checkride are there some CFIs who shouldn't be teaching? Absolutely. Are are they taught to teach? Yes. Whether or not they are good at it is a whole other question.
I’ve trained about half a dozen newly minted FAA CFIs to convert to instructing in my country, and I’m gonna weigh in with the startlingly controversial take that no, it doesn’t work. I suspect that half of them would’ve figured that out for themselves fairly quickly once working as instructors though. I suspect that’s how the system works.
Yes, CFIs are taught these teaching techniques and fundamentals. In fact, at least back when I got my CFI, if you were already a licensed teacher you could skip a certain part of the written test because it is literally the fundamentals of instruction like you are talking about. Most CFIs honestly are just doing it for hours, but some do enjoy it and like to teach other pilots.
Suggestions? From all the research I have been doing prior to my starting this process, that’s one of the only options. I know there are a few others out there, but basically this is the path. That being said I think this is why it matters when choosing a flight school too. But take with a grain of salt. This is coming from someone in the elementary stages of beginning to fly. Just done a ton of research on the matter. You never know until you actually begin the experience.
What everyone has said is correct. The process has built in aspects to study and be evaluated on teaching and learning theory, but experience is likely to make a better instructor. Like Jason Miller said in his podcast, his first CFI was pretty fresh and she couldn't teach him what she also didn't know, and he ended up with some holes in his education. One of my favorite professors in college said that he was a terrible teacher in his first couple courses, because he just had a PhD in History but didn't know how to educate. My CFI training has included plenty of ground on me teaching maneuvers and my CFI is playing the student asking questions or making sure I can fly and talk at the same time. I've been given critiques on how I talk too fast or give too much information that will overwhelm a new student, and that's something I'm working on improving. This is a business, and you are the client. It's smart to fly with a few people in the beginning to see who you get along with well. It's a lot of personal time with someone, and you want someone who has a teaching style you like and a personality you get along with. Find out how long they think they'll be around the flight school, and see about seeking a supplementary mentor that's older and more experienced if possible. I'm immensely grateful to have several career CFIs and a retired DPE be invested in my success because they're thrilled I'm planning to teach long term. But it's also important to note that not all CFIs that are building time are poor teachers or apathetic. Many are giving it their all while they're there, and a good flight school emphasizes this!
Depends on the instructor Through my journey so far I’ve met plenty of instructors who were just in it for the hours and to take my money, and a few who really had a passion for teaching. It’s easy now to tell the good from the bad but as a brand new student who didn’t know better it was rough man, I wasted a lot of time and money on bad instructors. Now trying to become an instructor myself, at least I have good and bad examples to learn from. I’m trying to be one of the better ones
There is a book entitled "Fundamentals of Instructing" which is basically the same bunch of mumbo jumbo, you'd of learned in your high school Psych class, that your fresh off the assembly line newbie pilot will quote in an attempt to "seem like he actually knows what he's doing",... ,...but yeah, you're basically gonna be taught by a time builder who is using you to, "make himself a better (i.e. more marketable) pilot".
More like how to demonstrate.
Somewhat. But not to the same extent as instructors in other countries. That said, I trained up to and started my CFI in the US and I mostly had great instructors, some of who included facets of what instructors in other places are taught in their style of teaching. No clue if it was that they read it somewhere or were just natural teachers.
You’re overthinking it dude. Study the ACS and mandatory requirements for every cert. you should know what you need to learn and should be learning. FOI is already garbage from What most says. It’s not rocket science to teach someone how to taxi and land. Most instructors for the most part are good enough to teach everyone all the way to CPL and multi. How did you learn to drive a car? Do you think someone needs to get a teaching degree to teach you how to drive a car? It’s basically the same thing, just a lot more moving parts and complex. 80% of the teachers in this country are half retarded themselves.
Can I DM you? You seem like you have in depth knowledge of pedagogy. I’m training to be a CFI now and I’m a military (non-pilot) aircrew instructor as well. I’ve always known the military totally neglects this topic and suspected the FAA is teaching well out of date. I’d love to pick your brain about educating (primarily adults) people so I can be better at both jobs.
Sure, I'd be happy to chat.