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.

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. 

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? 

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. 

Todd Kessler, an automotive instructor at York County School of Technology in Pennsylvania, uses multiple CDX resources to give his students a personal classroom experience with a variety of materials. 

From videos to virtual reality, technology has brought about quite a few changes to the traditional classroom. One of those changes, the flipped classroom, is becoming more popular than ever. 

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.” Henry Ford knows something about the importance of continuing to learn. 

Service advisors have a unique role as both the face of an automotive shop and the link between customers and technicians. Therefore, it makes sense that classroom training for service advisors should have a good balance between customer focused skills and automotive knowledge.

Instructors play an important role in providing this kind of targeted training. But aside from starting with a good foundation of knowledge, how can you instill the kinds of skills that help service advisors thrive in the classroom and on the job?