Client Centered Learning Development

This is the latest buzzword introduced into the driving instructor industry quite recently by both the Driving Standards Agency and many industry leaders. All of them are quite rightly trying, as we are, to improve the standard of driving instructors in the UK. Our Driving Instructor Training course has been training driving instructors to do this for over eight years.

Many others seem to be focussed on trying to figure out how to retrain ADI’s. We already have our own adi training aides in place which will allow you to easily develop these skills. We also make sure you get weekly training from day one to enable you to ‘coach’ to a much higher standard than your competitors resulting in a highly successful career.

The Hermes Project was a three year EU funded project involving some of the top ‘coaching experts’ in Europe. They were tasked with developing a 3-5 day training course to help driving instructors to develop coaching skills. As part of their findings they concluded ‘it takes months if not years to develop coaching skills’ and when learning to coach they said ‘you can’t get it from a book’ or ‘learn it in a classroom’.

Coaching is a complex subject in its own right and the problem is most of us would take an aweful long time to understand enough about it. To achieve what our driving instructors do is simple and it’s our job to show you how you can very simply achieve what we do. It’s not rocket science but we don’t want our competitors to catch up any time soon because we are possibly ten years ahead of them.

Coaching

This is a generic term for the natural learning or development that can be achieved provided someone has a reasonable level of knowledge and skill. If we use the example of coaching someone to play golf, the individual first needs to how to swing their arms. This is not the same as using LCD when training a pupil to use the pull-push technique as their brain in many cases  does not know how to move their arms in this way.

Wholly coaching would require us to allow pupils to choose how they would hold and move the wheel. Experience shows us without the correct level of instruction and mentoring, this task would end in failure and leave pupils demoralised. Only when an activity has been trained can we look to a pupil to develop an understanding of the rights and wrongs of what they are doing.

The GDE Matrix

GDE is a an acronym for Goals for Driver Education and matrix is a posh word for a table. More importantly, this is the structure which is set to be adopted throughout Europe and by the DSA and in turn the industry. In brief there are four levels through which pupils skills need to be developed.

It has already been determined that to train pupils to the two higher levels driving instructors will need to be able to coach rather than instruct. The DSA has already published a teaching schedule and structure they see, as being a minimum requirement for teaching in the not too distant future. At KISS we already have and work to a comprehensive schedule and structure which far exceeds what the DSA has published and we have simplified the format.