The Best Ways to
Ensure Mastery, Continued
Mastering Psychomotor Skills
Simply stated, you can’t learn to dive without getting in the water. While it’s true that students can learn about skills such as mask clearing, regulator recovery, air sharing, etc., using the same materials as they do to master cognitive skills, students can only master these skills by getting in the water and practicing them, repeatedly, under the supervision of a qualified instructor.
Therefore, at the moment, scuba instructors are far from expendable. Perhaps someday someone will invent a teaching android that can do a better job of demonstrating skills, supervising student practice and generally looking out for everyone’s well being than a human can. (Who knows? Perhaps we’ll need Will Smith to come and rescue us from them.) At the moment, however, our jobs are secure.
Instructors can increase the effectiveness of teaching psychomotor skills in a variety of ways, including:
- Making sure students have access to information that better explains skills prior to getting in the water.
- Improving the quality of skill demonstrations.
- Giving students ample opportunity to practice skills after they have reached the point where they can do each skill correctly. (It is not sufficient to have students practice skills only until they get it right. Students need the opportunity to repeatedly perform correctly in order for that behavior to become imprinted. Put another way, “Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.”).
- Combining individual skills in ways that better reflect real-life diving.
- Allowing students to apply the skills they have mastered in confined water by providing them with the opportunity to actually go diving in open water, rather than just repeating pool skills while kneeling on a platform or sandy bottom.
For more information on teaching effectively in open water, see the resource library entitled Teach Different, Teach Better.
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