Hi, this is my sixth article on the Bob Morton,” see it”, “say it”, “suss it” and “sort it” and how it can be client centred.
In this article, I am going to concentrate on changing the plan of the “sort it” element.
Change the plan is adapting the driving lesson. You may have to adapt at any stage of the lesson and for a number of reasons.
Let’s give you a number of reasons why a driving lesson would need to be changed or adapted:
A/ The pupil is finding the current lesson too difficult. You would have to be aware why this is happening for the lesson to be beneficial to the learner and for learning to have taken place(essential ).
These are a number the lesson is too difficult for the learner-
1/ The route you have picked is too demanding for them. You learner is over-loaded with the number of hazards they have to deal with, or you are overloading them by bombarding them with lots of instruction and prompts to control the increased level of risk. This can be changed or adapted by giving the pupil an easier route that is still stretching your pupils’ abilities, but not overwhelming them. (Your local knowledge of the training area is essential for you to do this).
2/ You haven’t offered the correct support level or type of instruction. When you set a new objective for the lesson, you should offer a number of different instructional strategies (covered next week) and let the student choice the option that is going to suit them. If the chosen option doesn’t work after a few attempts, then you would need to use another learning strategy. For instance, your pupil wants to be prompted (reminded what to do) and it doesn’t work. You could then suggest that you guided them through (Give them a talk thro on what to do).
B/ The pupil is finding the current lesson too easy. Same again you need to aware why this is happening as if you don’t adapt it, learning is not going to take place.
Let’s give you a few reasons why the pupil is finding the lesson too easy-
1/ The route you have chosen is too easy for their current level of ability. For example, you take a test ready pupil on quiet urban roads. Your pupil will soon get bored and become de-motivated, they might tell you this or stop having lesson with you. Remember your pupil needs to be slightly stretched for learning to take place, where some input is required from you (the driving instructor) to achieve their lesson objectives. You can make the route more demanding.
2/ The level of support you initially offered as worked and the pupil is starting to cope with the lesson objective. At this stage you would need to lower the level of support to see if the pupil can cope on their own. It’s important that you pupil agrees with this, so the pupil knows what is expected of them. You can do this on the move by saying,” You have completed the last two meeting situations quite successfully, would it be ok to do the next ones on your own”? If you pupil agrees with you then do it, but help them if they aren’t coping, if they don’t agree about you not supporting them, you can always ask them how many times they want to be helped, before they want to attempt something on their own.
3/ The pupil has achieved their objective for the lesson, before the lesson finishes. You would now need to formulate a new lesson objective by agreeing with your pupil what to do next or what they need help with or are finding difficult to do ( their learning needs, incredibly important to identify ).
This can be structured by finding what they already know about their new learning objective. When you need to find out what they don’t know or understand about their learning objective and finally how they going to do it.
C/ Your pupil keeps making the same driving error, a serious driving error or a dangerous driver error. You would have to research how each of these errors are defined. But the information can be found by looking at the Ready to Pass campaign by the DVSA, under conducting mock driving tests.
Ideally you should try to prevent these types of faults from occurring, by being proactive however we can’t always be perfect when predicting the actions of other road users. When these types of faults are committed, we need to refer to the “ suss it ” part of the system explained in one of my previous articles.
One really important aspect of changing the plan is not to change the plan if it’s not necessary. Something that can easily be dealt with whilst the vehicle is moving shouldn’t require the lesson to be changed. Or if a situation that can’t be repeated easily again and doesn’t happen very often like road workers walking out in front of your pupil in a set of road works. You would need to pull over and discuss it, but you wouldn’t need to change the lesson objective as it would be almost impossible to replicate the same situation again.