Imo, you can't teach how to teach. You've either got it or you don't.
Not from a book you can’t.
I’d say most of the teacher’s certificate colleges would beg to differ about whether teaching skills can be taught, however. Even FAA gives the nod to their training over FAA training.
The other way that works is what a local club here does, they have the CFI candidates actually prepare lessons and teach in a room, at a board, in front of other CFI candidates and a few CFIs and get critiques.
It works. It’s like putting young actors on stage. You CAN teach basic acting, improv, stage presence, etc. It takes a bit more effort for the budding actor to become GREAT at it, but you can teach how to act.
One of our DPEs here is very good at it, but of course he’s not allowed to teach during a checkride. Anyone ever asks me how they can up their teaching game, however, I’d tell them to plan on doing their ride with someone else, and hiring him to coach them for a while.
Common teaching errors like using imprecise words and instructions, not using common terminology or using slang, etc... all things he can easily beat out of someone in a few short sessions.
FOI is pretty much just a “toss a 1970s textbook about adult learning at someone and hope they can apply it” approach to teaching how to teach.
And no, that doesn’t work. It might make a decent primer on terminology of teaching for someone who’s never taught adults ever, but many of the concepts in it have been debunked already in the modern adult teaching world. Not all. And most people won’t know which are which.
It badly needs an update, but I’d be a little scared of what a bunch of government psychologists would come up with nowadays for an updated edition.
Plenty of commercial training professional organizations out there who know EXACTLY how to pound certain things into brains, though...
Here’s another economic reality. If flight instruction had high paid jobs at the top end, as high paid as many other profession’s trainers, there’d be additional levels of instructor ratings well above the ones we have now, and they would be very HARD work to obtain. Not saying the current rating isn’t difficult, but they’d be orders of magnitude harder.
The secret truth about how FAA handles the CFI rating is tied back to the economics of the overall aviation business and CFI being one of the few jobs someone can barely earn a living at while jumping through the hour hoops to move on up. FAA knows it’s a “time building” job and also knows it shouldn’t be, but what are they going to do?
Kill the job the majority of freshly minted Commercial certificate holders go into today, to reach the required hours for ATP? No. They’ll never make it that hard.
That’s said, they are now claiming the new CFI ACS comes out next year... that document is going to be intensely entertaining before the bug fixes are downloaded into it around 2020, judging by the utter gaffs in the Private and Commercial ACS that got fixed this year.
(Oh look. An examiner can ask a Commercial candidate to actually stall an airplane again! Not that they ever stopped, and not that anyone taking a checkride didn’t know they never stopped. LOL.)
What really cant be taught easily is how to motivate someone who’s not interested in learning. Luckily the vast majority of aviation students sign up willingly and aren’t locked in the classroom by law or someone’s expectation that they learn something they don’t want to. Once in a while, I have seen other instructors get that (dad’s a pilot and he’s paying and says I have to become a pilot too...) but not that often.
Most people start off wanting to become a Pilot. In other forms of teaching, the student may not even want to be there. Deeply. Usually at least at some level aviation students want to become pilots. That kills whole chapters in formal teaching textbooks right there.
The FOI is a punt. FAA *had* to come up with some sort of basic teaching knowledge as a reference and also as a standard to test against. It’s ain’t great, it ain’t awful. It’s just kinda bland with a number of old concepts that aren’t “state of the art” in adult learning anymore.
There’s useful info in it, even some good applicable concepts in it, but it’s dry. It takes a good “teaching teacher” to provide examples of how the concepts apply to the real world.
