Question time

Not everyone who passes their driving test has had lessons with an instructor. Many parents assume that, because they can drive, they are capable of teaching their son/daughter. And some parents are capable. But I have had so many calls from parents (mums usually) saying that they have tried to teach their son/daughter, but have eventually decided to leave it to a professional instructor.
Sometimes it is just a clash of personalities that causes the problem. Sometimes it is because there is a big difference between knowing how to do something and being able to teach it. I clearly remember the first time in my instructor training  that I had to 'teach'. Bob, my trainer, pretended to be the pupil and asked me to teach him how to start the car and move off safely. I had been a qualified driver for over 20 years by this time, but I struggled to instruct him to do this seemingly simple task. It was something which I could do so easily without thinking about it, but it was that very fact which made it hard for me to teach. It was a bit like asking Monet how to paint, or Robbie Fowler how to score a goal.
Of course, that is partly why I parted with thousands of pounds to BSM, so that someone (Bob) could teach me how to teach. It was a quite a long process, but it was definitely definitely worth it in the end.
If you are training to become a Driving Instructor, by far and away your biggest priority should be passing your Part 3 exam. Almost all your training should be geared towards this. Additionally, if you are teaching on a pink licence, you should use that time to perfect your delivery of the PSTs (the Pre-set test themes: Crossroads, Turn in the road, etc).
When it comes to the Part 3 exam, you are required to tailor the level of instruction to the ability of the pupil. By that, I mean that a novice should get full instruction (e.g "Check your rear and right mirrors", "Postion your car just to the left of the centre line"), a part-trained pupil should be taught by prompts and Q&A (e.g. "Which mirrors are you going to check here?", "Where do you want to position your car?"), and a test-ready pupil should be almost independent of instruction, but have their knowledge tested by questions such as "If you saw a fast-approaching vehicle in your right mirror, what effect might that have on the timing of your signal?" or "Are there any circumstances when you would not want to position your car to the right when turning right?".
This tailoring of instruction makes sense and I am not going to suggest any deviation from it, especially if you are a trainee instructor.
But.......

I am finding that I am having a lot of success with introducing the Q&A and even the hypothetical questions at a very early stage. It seems that this gets the pupil really thinking about what to do (and WHY), rather than relying on being told what to do.
This morning I wanted to teach Dean how to reverse into a road on the left. He has had about 6 hours of lessons and in his last lesson we looked at how to turn the car around in the road.
Apart from telling him the aim of the manoeuvre, I didn't actually give him any 'instruction', I just got him to think his way through the whole thing by a series of questions: "How can you let other road users know of your intention to reverse?", "What is the problem with going too close to/far from the curb?" "How will those potholes affect your clutch control?" "How quickly can the situation change around you?" "How far back do you think you need to reverse to make the junction safe for others?" and so on.
You can imagine my delight (and Dean's) when, after this heavy theory, he executed an almost perfect left reverse first time with no full, and barely any prompted, instruction. Ok, maybe I got lucky with Dean. I am certainly not naive enough to start thinking that this is going to work every time with every pupil.
But maybe instructors may benefit from crediting their pupils with a bit of intelligence and encouraging them to think what to do rather than tell them.
Of course, if I ask a pupil a question and they reply "I don't know", that is fine. I won't necessarily tell them the answer, but I will try to offer another question so that they may arrive at the answer that way. And there will be times when a pupil has to be told how to do something, or they will have to be told the answer because they do not have enough related knowledge to work it out for themselves.
A final bonus is that it makes my job even more interesting, trying to steer someone else's brain in a certain direction, rather than repeat a list of instructions I have given to hundreds of previous pupils.
Just a thought.