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Safety.

It’s not the most exciting subject in the automotive classroom, but it’s certainly one of the most important. Even if your students aren’t eagerly awaiting your lesson on how to use eye protection or the importance of inspecting equipment, you know how necessary it is for students to absorb and follow safety guidelines. All it takes is one accident to ruin a person’s day, week, or even their entire life, which means skimping on teaching safety is not an option.

Students hate taking tests and instructors hate grading them. So why should you spend more time than necessary dealing with testing?

Many students (and at least a few instructors) might wish they could skip test-taking altogether, but the truth is that tests can be valuable indicators of a student’s progress and skills. They can also help instructors and students identify gaps in knowledge and pinpoint what still needs to be learned. 

Over the course of our strategy-based instruction series, we’ve verified the skills students need and the best options for teaching them. We’ve explored how to help students learn through coaching and how to make sure their practice time is well-spent. Most of all, we’ve established that the “customer” instructors should have in mind is the student’s future employer. 

In strategy-based diagnostics, the final step is to verify that the concern has been addressed. When it comes to strategy-based instruction, the instructor can’t consider the process complete without verifying that a student has learned the skills their employer will need. 

In the previous post in our strategy-based instruction blog series, we walked through some best practices for coaching students to help them learn more effectively. In this step, we’ll focus on how you can help students apply and practice new skills without hindering their self-learning. 

During the previous parts of our strategy-based instruction series, you’ve established that your customer is the employer and verified the skills your students need to learn. You’ve also explored the best way to teach with the resources you have. Now, it’s time to actually teach those skills.

Even if you don’t have a strong education background, there are a few simple strategies you can rely on to make sure your students do well. 

In the first two parts of our strategy-based instruction blog series, we explained the basis of this teaching method and explored how to verify the job skills that students need before entering the workforce.  

Once you’ve determined what skills and behaviors your students need to learn based on what employers need, it’s time to figure out the best way to teach them. This is where both new and experienced instructors encounter a common problem. How do you cover all the material students should learn with limited time and resources? 

In part one of the strategy-based instruction series, we talked about the basics of this technique. We also noted how, when it comes to education, the employer is the customer, not the student. Once this is understood, there is a simple way of tackling the first step of strategy-based instruction: verifying the job skill. 

When did you first become an automotive or diesel instructor?

If you’re like many other instructors in the field, you probably spent time as a technician before turning to education and, like any good instructor, did your best to improve your teaching skills. Between a variety of instructor guides to professional development workshops, it can seem like there’s a lot to figure out. But instead of trying to learn all kinds of new processes and terms when it comes to teaching, it can often be just as effective to work with what you already know. 

When it comes to supporting automotive programs, students, and instructors, it’s easy enough to think of large foundations, such as the ASE Family of Organizations. But there are many more organizations with the goal of providing support, scholarships, training, and other resources in the hopes of engaging youth and providing the necessary tools to help the automotive industry address skills gaps and technician shortages.