Pilots studying to become Certified Flight Instructors have new help from King Schools in preparing for the required Fundamentals of Instruction Knowledge Test.
In Chapter 3 of the FAA’s Aviation Instructor’s Handbook, the official guide for fledgling flight instructors, you are advised to avoid abstract language, because it is not the best way to convey clear, unambiguous, and memorable information to a student pilot. If only the FAA had heeded its own advice, King Schools officials say.
As every would-be flight instructor soon learns, the 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 seems like a fairly straightforward process — showing some eager student 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.
The new King Schools Fundamentals of Instruction Ground School and Test Prep helps you shoot an approach through the verbal clouds, officials say.
Presented by King Schools CEO Barry Knuttila, who is 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 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.”
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.”
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, King Schools officials explain.
One aspect of flight instruction emphasized in the new 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, officials continue. 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 strives to make it manageable, officials noted.
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.
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.
The course sells for $199 for lifetime access, and is available at KingSchools.com.