Four times, and for some unknown reason, a 17-year-old can do this a surprising number of times. The drivers behind you are giving you dirty looks, leaning on your horn as if that is going to help them. You’ve actually done nothing wrong, your job as an instructor isn’t to stop the car from stalling; your job is to stop the student’s panic attacks escalating. The biggest downfall of most driving instructor courses is that they don’t seem to address this training aspect discover more.

Generally, driving instructor courses spend the majority of time teaching you the theoretical aspects of driving.

They spend hundreds of hours with PowerPoint lessons that cover the law, basic mechanics and car insurance. Although this training is extremely valuable and absolutely essential for eventually teaching new drivers to pass their test, it’s staggering to learn what the actual training involved was for instructors who have now been teaching for over 10 years. If you’re surprised how many will attribute their training success to anything more than their hundredth lesson rather than their hundredth PowerPoint slide, prepare to be more so.

There is a common misconception amongst many individuals considering a career in driving instruction, which is that the essential skill required is actually driving. Driving is entirely irrelevant to this career. We have thousands of individuals who can competently operate a vehicle yet they would be terrible instructors.

If you are to explain how to successfully perform a parallel parking manoeuver with a vehicle, you must try and slip into your pupil’s brain and try and understand their thought processes; where their thoughts are going and what they’re frightened of.

Your own proficiency at driving is a completely separate skill. A number of the more capable driving instructors that I know call this skill translators. They essentially take all the tacit knowledge we possess as competent drivers and turn it into language a terrified 17-year-old will not only understand, but it will also help them digest and put into practice. The element of a driving instructor course that most people overlook time and time again is the communication element.

One afternoon dedicated to this area is usually more than enough, yet this is getting the whole situation upside down.

In the situation above where your pupil panics and stalls for the fifth time at the roundabout, they don’t want another explanation of the road traffic act and the specific rule that they may have forgotten. They want somebody who understands their panic and can talk them through it, making them feel competent again without feeling foolish. Over the past couple of years, some more modern driving instructor courses have begun to address this issue by involving learners even at the beginning of the instructor’s training.

These new instructors have to attempt to give a lesson to a real student under instruction with the result being recorded for post-lesson viewing and public mortification. They actually work.