Flight instructor training

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Aaron Locke

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I am currently working on my CFI rating at a part 141 school and so far it's been tough. I hold an instrument rating with a commercial SEL and MEL. CFI has been the toughest of the ratings yet. Not because I can't do it but because I lack the motivation of tediously sitting there making lesson plans. For those that have completed CFI is there any advice you could give me to help me with this struggle? I need to get this done in a month and have only done about half the lesson plans completed. I hope someone can relate to this post and possibly share their 2c. Thanks
 
Get more motivated? What is causing you to not be motivated? The rating is yours if you want it!
 
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Maybe sit down with your instructor and explain what you're having difficulty with. Your instructor should be able to help you. Plenty of written material on how to prepare a lesson plan. Your motivation is entirely up to you to get past this road block. If you want it bad enough you can do it. Good luck!
 
Aaron Locke said:
I am currently working on my CFI rating at a part 141 school and so far it's been tough. I hold an instrument rating with a commercial SEL and MEL. CFI has been the toughest of the ratings yet. Not because I can't do it but because I lack the motivation of tediously sitting there making lesson plans. For those that have completed CFI is there any advice you could give me to help me with this struggle? I need to get this done in a month and have only done about half the lesson plans completed. I hope someone can relate to this post and possibly share their 2c. Thanks
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Try using back seat pilot and catering it to the plane you're flying. That's what I did and it worked out well. It gives you a great starting point.
 
If you aren't motivated now, think of how motivated you'll be if you have to show up for a student who is expecting it of you. Personally, if I was your instructor, I'd give you notice that you were giving a ground lesson tomorrow night on a specified topic - and you were paying for the "lesson," too, and if you sucked, the lesson would be free for the other student.
 
I hit a severe lack of motivation at one point, and I had to power through to get it done. I am very glad that I did it now although at the time I was questioning why I was even bothering. One thing I did was to set rigid times to study and prepare and not let myself be distracted during those times. Otherwise, I completely tuned it out so that it didn't hang over my head. Compartmentalizing helped me out. Also, I would pick something out about the end goal (instructing) that appeals to you and focus on that as your motivation.
 
i'd guess the object isn't "completing lesson plans", but rather completing lesson plans is the means to get you to think about what and how you're going to teach the lesson...that should be interesting to you, I hope.
 
The challenge I had with lesson plans is most of the CFIs I trained with did not share their lesson plans with me and it was hard to imagine what I would teach someone I had never met.
I picked a friend who was a chemistry professor at a local collage and taught him to fly while he taught me to make lesson plans as he progressed.
I have found the skill very helpful and I do share my lesson plan and the completion standards with the students.
In my opinion the aircraft is a poor classroom and ground instruction is less expensive and less dangerous. I find a good lesson plan helps me stay on track in both the pre-flight instruction and the debrief. I feel it enhances the learning if the student knows the completion standards and the practical test standards
In retrospect I feel the majority of my flight instructors did not have a lesson plan and my learning suffered for it.
 
Thank you everyone for your comments and advice! I'm glad to see that I am not the only one that had some struggles with the CFI rating. The lesson plans just seem to be a completely different dynamic as far as aviation training goes and I think it threw me off (because it's not what I'm used to doing and seeing). Thanks again!
-agl
 
As most of the CFIs learn, and the poor private student may never realize, is that the aviation world doesn't put much emphasis on understanding HOW to teach until the last minute. Reading thru the FOIs really doesn't give you much of a grasp of understanding how to present material, much less how to organize it. To the OP, if you know a k-12 teacher, sit down with them for an hour and ask them to show you how to break down a topic into the learning objectives, the tasks and how to evaluate mastery of a task.

Or go find a really good software engineer and ask the same thing.

Another project - pick that topic/task that gave you the most trouble as a begining student, and now with your experience, how would you approach teaching it? How would you explain it, then how to demonstrate it?
 
Try tutoring students, and offering some coaching on flights with others.

It is the hardest ride of ones career.
 
Hardest, nah. Did the CFI, CFII, and MEI. Type rides are harder IMO.
 
Type rides can get difficult because you get a lot of new stuff in a relatively short time period before the check ride.

Unfortunately, most CFI training is handled the same way, even though most of the requirements are known well in advance.:rolleyes:
 
MauleSkinner said:
i'd guess the object isn't "completing lesson plans", but rather completing lesson plans is the means to get you to think about what and how you're going to teach the lesson...that should be interesting to you, I hope.
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That, in my opinion, is exactly what writing the lesson plans is for. If a person goes through and writes a syllabus for the private and commercial ratings, then writes a lesson plan for each of the maneuvers the CFI applicant should be reasonably prepared to start teaching those lessons. I started writing my lesson plans by sitting down with the PTS and also thinking about what I learned with each rating and started writing.

If I were going to guess, the OP got started on it and lost motivation once they started realizing how long it was going to take to write the lesson plans. I started and stopped several times and ended up having to hurry a bit at the end because I didn't have them all done when I started the formal training for my instructor rating.

Aaron Locke said:
Thank you everyone for your comments and advice! I'm glad to see that I am not the only one that had some struggles with the CFI rating. The lesson plans just seem to be a completely different dynamic as far as aviation training goes and I think it threw me off (because it's not what I'm used to doing and seeing). Thanks again!
-agl
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The lesson plans are more important to jog your memory on what you need to teach more than how to teach it. It is worth the effort to write the plans out, but if your only real goal is to pass the CFI checkride I think you'll be disappointed with how much time you spent writing them vs. how much time was spent going over them on the checkride.

murphey said:
As most of the CFIs learn, and the poor private student may never realize, is that the aviation world doesn't put much emphasis on understanding HOW to teach until the last minute. Reading thru the FOIs really doesn't give you much of a grasp of understanding how to present material, much less how to organize it. To the OP, if you know a k-12 teacher, sit down with them for an hour and ask them to show you how to break down a topic into the learning objectives, the tasks and how to evaluate mastery of a task.
Click to expand...

For the most part, the training for the CFI checkride doesn't really reflect what actually happens when instructing either. There are some people who could ace the checkride but never really would be that good at teaching (or they might figure it out eventually, at the student's expense), while others may not do so well on the checkride but actually be decent instructors.

The first instructor I worked with was never really good at communicating. He had a decent amount of knowledge and was a good pilot but never really learned how to teach someone else to be a pilot. I still learned a lot from him, but it took a long time.
 
With places like flight saftey someone is paying ALOT of money for their guys to get "done"

With a initial FSDO CFI, no one cares about getting you done.
 
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