Pilots studying to become flight instructors can have special help from King Schools in preparing for the required Fundamentals of Instruction Knowledge Test.
As every would-be flight instructor soon learns, the FAA's Aviation Instructor's Handbook, and the all-important Fundamentals of Instruction written test based on it, introduce a lot of academic jargon that can be a daunting hurdle for practical-minded instructor candidates. What seemed like a fairly straightforward process — showing eager students how to handle an airplane — turns out to be about "correlation," "primacy," "complex overt response," "characterization," and a lot of other things you never heard of.
A new King Schools course helps you shoot an approach through the verbal clouds. Presented by King Schools CEO Barry Knuttila, himself an active flight instructor, the four-hour course links the academic-sounding language of educational theory to practical situations and experiences that arise in real-life flight instruction. Knuttila brings a raised-eyebrow good humor to his task, at one point noting that "automaticity" — a typical FAA-ism — is a word "that no one who speaks English has ever seen, or successfully pronounced."
For the FAA, "teaching flying" is more about teaching than it's about flying, and much of the Fundamentals of Instruction syllabus can be applied to other kinds of instruction. The purpose of all the unfamiliar vocabulary is to help you recognize the subtle signals in the interactions between you and your students, and to avoid pitfalls encountered by all professional educators. Off-putting as it may be, the academic language pins labels on things that you might otherwise not even notice, and helps you to see them better.
One aspect of flight instruction emphasized in the King Schools Fundamentals of Instruction course is the need to see a student's stumbles not necessarily as evidence of a lack of aptitude or effort on the student's part, but as possible clues to shortcomings in your own teaching. Instructors must learn to evaluate and assess not only their students, but themselves. They need empathy. Learning to fly — and fly safely — is a very complex task, involving not only a great deal of factual knowledge but also psycho-motor skills, complicated procedures, and, hardest of all to teach, judgment and sound risk assessment. Much of the teaching is done one-on-one. As a flight instructor, you must be not only a teacher but also a psychologist, an acute observer of the student's mental state, and even a life coach, guiding the student toward using mature, objective judgment during in-flight events that can be bewildering or frightening.
The FAA throws all this at you in the form of a 130-page syllabus that at first sight looks overwhelming. The King Schools course makes it manageable. Presented in a series of brief segments, each lasting just a few minutes and followed by a short multiple-choice quiz, it allows the viewer to stop and resume at any time, or to double back and review material previously covered. Re-reading the Aviation Instructor's Handbook is a different experience once Knuttila has taken you on a friendly walk through the material. The course follows the King Study Method to prepare for your FAA written exam, including off-line access on your mobile device, practice exams, a flash card app and tools to assess your readiness for the FAA written test.
Oh, and just in case you were wondering about "automaticity" — it just means doing things instinctively, without having to think consciously about them. The accent is on the "ti."
