They are going to gain 5 minutes 'face to face' instructor time per day = 1 lesson each 9 days.
How many days will it shorten the Airframe / Engines Technician course by?
Its not the number of minutes thats important in this instance, its the re-distribution of training periods. When I wrote the module I am SME for I set 8 periods (1 day) as being a reasonable amount of time in which to cover a particular topic. That is based on experience gained from knowing that instructor and trainee fatigue means that learning slows down in the afternoon and that the last period or so is dead time that is used for recap or doing workbooks or quizzes. Under this latest harebrained idea I now have 9 periods so must start period 1 of the next lesson at 1/4 past 4 or whatever - utterly ridiculous.
So over a period of 5 days I'd use 40 periods, they can now be squeezed into just under 4 1/2 days, a saving of 1 day every 10ish. As stated before its an idea based on specious reasoning, anyone who has ever sat in a classroom, anywhere, ever knows that towards the end of the day the instructor and the trainees begin to fatigue and what appears to be training time is actually dead time in which nothing useful is actually happening.
This is just one of a number of recent edicts that have been aimed at the instructors telling us how to do our job - even though the majority of those issuing the edicts don't themselves have any idea about what our role entails and those that do have blissful memories from over a decade ago and an opinion tainted by self-interest.
There is a drive from above to transform training and make it more akin to the classroom you see in schools where children are doing self-directed learning (Evidence Based Teaching) and using computers (VLE). I have nothing against either of those concepts but the increasing haranguing tone being adopted, warning of dire consequences if we don't comply, smacks of desperation to force change rather than allow it to happen by natural osmosis. Indeed, as is often the case with the forces, as one trendy idea becomes passe with the powers that be, the mainstream world is going 180 degrees the other way; trendy teaching ideas such as discovery learning have recently been condemned by Prof Coe of the Sutton education Trust. These are excerpts from the report and they are all things we, the instructors, have been saying but to no avail. because being right ina military environment is not a question of experience or qualification, it is of course a matter of how many and the thickness of, the bars on your shoulder.
It warns that many ‘common practices’, such as allowing youngsters to discover key ideas by themselves, are either ‘ineffective or inefficient’.
It says another popular technique, ‘discovery learning’, where pupils find key ideas by themselves, is also ineffective. The study says: ‘If teachers want them to learn new ideas, knowledge or methods they need to teach them directly.’
Professor Coe said: ‘Great teaching cannot be achieved by following a recipe, but there are some clear pointers in the research to approaches that are most likely to be effective, and to others, sometimes quite popular, that are not.
‘Teachers need to understand why, when and how a particular approach is likely to enhance students’ learning.’
DT_Xtremez_28: