CFI ACS Task A Explained: Human Behavior & Communication Made Simple

0:00You're listening to the VSL Aviation Podcast. I'm your host, Seth Lake. Welcome back. In today's episode, we're diving into the Flight Instructor, Airman Certification Standards. That's right, the CFI ACS folks. It is here, the most highly requested type of podcast that I do, and this is going to be probably a long one and one of men. So we're looking at at least six episodes for the CFI. And I'm starting out with the beginning of the ACS, which is Area of Operation One Task A. We're going to dive into the ACS here. So if you're training to become a CFI or you want to become a CFI, this is a great episode for you to listen to. Now, if you are one of my private pilot or student pilot applicants or instrument or commercial, don't worry, there's really good evergreen content that's on the podcast and YouTube channel. All of the past episodes that I have done still apply to the way the checkrides are given. Now, even though some of them might be four or five years old, the ACS has changed slightly,

1:05but you can still use all those. So feel free to go back and listen to that back catalog of videos. I think they're still helpful. But for this one, we're starting with the new or relatively new CFI Airman Certification Standards. It changed a little over a year ago from the practical test standards to the Airman Certification Standards. And that was a big change. So I've kind of delayed on doing this podcast because this is such a big lift, but bear with me, we're going to work our way through it. So I've got the ACE Guide pulled up. This isn't ACE Guide commercial, but I will be using this. If you want to purchase the ACE Guide, feel free to go to the website vsl.arrow, and it'll tell you all about what this guide is. It's basically a FAA reference system that you can use to help you study and learn the regulations. But that's the document that I'm using here. Now, if you're listening to this as a podcast with no video, I'll try to make it as always as audio-friendly as possible. But there may be some things that you would get by looking at the actual documents that I have pulled up on the screen. So go over to either Spotify or YouTube,

2:09and you can see the full video there. All right, I'll quit rambling here and we'll get started. So the CFI ACS or the flight instructor ACS, it's broken down like any other airman certification standards. It has several different areas of operation, and within each area of operation we have tasks, and within each task we have three subgroups of elements. We have knowledge elements, risk management elements, and skill elements. The flight instructor ACS, though, is a little different. There's actually two different codes. So I'll just show you here real quick on the fundamentals of instruction. That's area of operation one, commonly known as the FOIs, right? We have task A, and if you look at the knowledge codes here, it says FI. So that starts with FI on the knowledge codes. Now, if we go back, though, and we pull up the technical subject areas, human factors, those knowledge codes start with AI. All right, the reason we have those two different codes is

3:11there's two different written exams for us to take to qualify for the flight instructor practical test. I've got the FAA testing matrix pulled up here. You can Google that and pull it up online, but we can see we have the FOI, the fundamentals of instruction here, and that's one of the tests that we take. And all of area of operation one is focused on the fundamentals of instruction. The rest of the test ACS is pulling from and we're just going to assume that everybody's taking an airplane flight instructor. If you're doing helicopter gyroplane or glider, this is slightly different, but they're pulling from the FIA, the flight instructor airplane. So those two written tests qualify you to take the flight instructor practical test. All right, back to our initial subject here, we're covering in this episode everything in area of operation one task A, which is effects of human behavior. That's the first section over the fundamentals of instruction or the FOIs. Now, the FOIs all pull out of the flight instructor handbook and we'll take a

4:14look at that here in a second, but there's six tasks. And that's I want you to understand this because there's a lot of information crammed and to six pages. Okay, so we have six tasks over the FOIs. And again, all of these FOIs point back to the instructor handbook. So if we pull up the aviation instructor handbook, there's 10 chapters in that book. I didn't count up the pages. I think it's, you know, it's over 100 pages might be over 200 pages. It's a pretty thick handbook. And really, some of the subjects here are taught as year long college courses, right? You might take a communication course in college that's an entire semester or two semesters long. And it's just a chapter in the aviation instructor handbook. So already the aviation instructor handbook is distilling a lot of kind of heavy information into a relatively small book. And then the ACS even distills that further into just six pages of information that we're supposed to test.

5:19So the reason I bring that up is just it's a lot of condensed information and they can be a little overwhelming. And that's a feedback that I get a lot from people is they're about to take their flight instructor exam. And they're like, Seth, where do I even start? Because it's overwhelming, right? There's so much information out there that it can easily overwhelm you as just a relatively new commercial pilot, right? Because that's when you're beginning studying for the CFI in earnest is after you've gotten your commercial rating done. Now, honestly, your training as a CFI begins when you take your first flight lesson because the foundational knowledge that you learn as a student pilot or private and instrument commercial, that's all foundational to what you're going to know as a CFI. So really, your training as a CFI begins day one of your flight training. Now, the specific training for the CFI test that typically takes place in the, you know, maybe weeks and months prior to you taking the actual exam. And there's a lot of accelerated CFI

6:23courses and all those are really good for helping solidify this information. But really, what they're focusing on typically is going to be the FOI. That's the first section we're talking about. The FOIs are kind of the first new thing that you're going to learn as a CFI. Everything else you should know as a commercial pilot or a private pilot. So we're not adding any extra maneuvers. We're not teaching you any really new things in the airplane, other than flying the airplane from the right seat. We'll talk about that in later episodes. But that, you know, flying the airplane from the right seat, that's really the only kind of hand-eye coordination type of skill that you're learning in CFI training. The rest of it is you're just learning how to communicate and teach. And that's what the fundamentals of instruction are all about the FOIs. So before I dive into the ACS, let me just take a couple of minutes to talk about what I think you should be doing to prepare to take your CFI exam. I think there's a lot of corporate knowledge

7:24in our, you know, aviation culture as it is that one of the first things you should do is write your lesson plans. And we're going to talk about lesson plans later. That's a task C here, your course development. This talks about lesson plans. So we're not going to talk about that in the task A today. But lesson plans, the commercially available lesson plans are completely acceptable. And that's what I would suggest that you do is you use commercially available lesson plans. I don't think that, well, I'll put it this way. I think your time is better spent doing other things other than writing and formatting lesson plans. And the analogy that I've kind of settled on that I think proves or at least that that I agree with here is, you know, imagine if you're working in this restaurant as a cook and you've been working at that restaurant for years and you've kind of mastered all the recipes and you know where everything is in the kitchen and, you know, if their order comes up, you can make it pretty flawlessly without any issues. And your boss

8:27comes up to you one day and says, Hey, we've hired a new cook and I'm going to task you with training them. I don't think the rational thing for you to do at that point would be to say, okay, cool boss, I'm going to go home and write a cookbook real quick. You know, that just doesn't even make sense, right? Why would you do that? There's plenty of recipes available. You don't need to write a cookbook. Why would you do that? That seems like a waste of time. It seems like the more rational thing for you to say is, Hey boss, that's great. Thanks for the opportunity. Would you mind maybe staying after work or helping me with some overtime at some point and I need to practice teaching because I'm obviously I'm good at cooking all of this stuff, but I haven't ever cooked while explaining how to do it to somebody else. And so I need practice doing that because the skills I've got down, the communication I need practice with it. So I really need to practice teaching this stuff. You know, would you help me do that? That seems like a great way to spend your time preparing to become a teacher, not writing a cookbook. Anyway, I won't belabor that

9:33analogy anymore. Hopefully you'll kind of understand and there's some head nodding saying, yeah, that makes sense. Now I know that I'm going to get pushed back here. I get pushed back online because I see online a lot of people say, Hey, I've learned so much writing my lesson plans. It just helped me become a better instructor. And hey, if it worked for you, that's great. I'm just saying that that's not proof positive that that is the best way. That just means it worked for you. That doesn't mean that there's not a better way. And the last thing I'll say on this point is coming from the military side of things, a military instructor is expected to know how to write lesson plans. They are expected to know what's what needs to be in a basic lesson plan, but they are not expected to write lesson plans. And a military instructor typically has way more hours in experience and training than a civilian instructor. And then they're not expected to do that, right? Those lesson plans in syllabus, all that stuff is written at like a command level. And it

10:35goes through a border review process. And then it's pushed out to the instructor core. And then we just execute the syllabus. We execute the lesson plans. So we teach the things that we're given. We don't write our own things normally. Now you should be able to write a short lesson plan, like, Hey, the student struggling with X, Y or Z, I can develop and tailor kind of a personal lesson plan of saying, Hey, we're going to go up on an extra sortie. And we're going to work on this one thing. And here's your basic lesson plan. And I may put that in a grade book. And it's important that we write these things down so other instructors can pick up where we left off. And we can leave that feedback. Right. It's important that we know how to do all that. But it is not required by the ACS. And it's not required by the FAA that you do it yourself. So I would highly recommend you not wasting a lot of time writing lesson plans. All right. Now more specifically to the FOIs, the other thing that I hear is memorizing the FOIs because the instructor handbook is again, a tone of information. And there's all these acronyms out there to help you memorize these different FOIs. And I think that's a waste of time,

11:40too. I'll give a caveat though. If you know that the DPE that you're going to use or that's in your area expects you to have those things memorized, then you got to have to, you know, you have to kind of play the game there. And I wish I had a better answer. I wish I could just wave my magic wand and make all the DPE's test the CFI the same exact way. But there's just simply nothing in the ACS that says you need to have wrote memory of all the FOIs. It just says you need to have knowledge of them. And there's no regulation saying you can't use, you know, material on the ground. So if in other in other words, if I ask you about, well, let's just look at your effects of human behavior here. This is our area of operation one task A, what we're going to be talking about today. So the definitions of human behavior, do you have to have that memorized? Well, the knowledge element just says the applicant understands and explains elements of human behavior,

12:44including definition of human behavior. So if I get the definition slightly wrong, but I get the gist of it, like I clearly have a working knowledge, that meets the knowledge topic here. Now, if you missed this on your FOI and then you've just butchered the definition, yeah, that's not a good look. And that could, you know, result in a notice of disapproval. But I don't expect you to have wrote memorization of all of these things because it's a lot of things. Right. And I think if you spend so much time memorizing these, you're not spending enough time developing your communication skills, which I think are one of the most important things to be an effective instructor is having that good communication skill set. And that takes practice. So I would rather you be practicing that than practicing memorizing a bunch of definitions and acronyms. So you know exactly how they work that's the ACS doesn't demand that. Now, we've got it open here. So we're area of operation one task A, again, the three categories of

13:47elements that we have in each task are knowledge topics or knowledge elements, risk management elements and skill elements. Now, the risk management elements are kind of interesting. I feel like they're shoehorned into the ACS a little bit because it's hard to define risk management when it comes to human behavior. Maybe a little bit is just not as clear cut as like risk management while you're operating the aircraft. You know, you're teaching here, but they're there nonetheless. And the rules are that we have to evaluate at least one knowledge topic, at least one risk management topic, and you have to demonstrate all of the skill elements of each task. Now, an important thing to note here is that we also have to evaluate any questions that you missed on the FOI and their associated knowledge topic element. So for instance, if you missed definitions of human behavior on the FOI test, you would have the FI or the FIAK1A code on your

14:51Airman Knowledge Test Report. So I would take and I would highlight that in the ACS, and now I know I also I have to ask you about that on the practical test. So if you missed that question on the written, I'm going to have to ask you that question during the oral part of the exam. So that can be in addition to the one knowledge topic that I need to ask, or I can just use that as the one knowledge topic I have to ask. So it doesn't necessarily have to be additive. Now, another important thing to note here, and we'll, this more applies to other kind of the skills section of the maneuvers, is that the 8900.1, which is kind of like the Bible for the DPEs that are giving a test, it says in the chapter on CFI exams that anything in the underlying ACS are fair game. So we can ask questions from the private or commercial ACS as well as the CFI ACS. So we can kind of use all three. And that's also a big difference between the

15:56other ACS's. But for the FOIs, you know, there's no FOI stuff at the private or commercial level. So this is all just state, you know, strictly out of the FOI. The final thing I'll cover before we dive into this task are the notes at the beginning of area of operation one. And the notes are all really important. Whenever you start a new area of operation, each ACS has a little name or most of them. And this note is particularly important because it tells me as the examiner, what is the minimum I have to test? And it tells you as the applicant, what is the minimum am I expected to demonstrate out of this area of operation? Because the area of operation, just because there's six, you know, back to the FOIs here, there are tasks A through F. You don't have to cover all of those. And the way we know that is the note here. So it says the evaluator must select task E, task F, and at least one other task for initial flight instructor applicants during a practical test for an additional flight instructor rating or a flight instructor rein statement the evaluator

17:00has discretion to evaluate the applicant on fundamentals of instructing. So if you're doing an add-on rating or if you're doing a rein statement, you don't even have to cover any of them. It's just our discretion. But for the initial, you only have to cover three. So tasks E and F and then one other task. So task E is professional environment and then task F is risk management. I wonder if the FAA thinks risk management is important. You know, yeah, they definitely do. They've added risk management elements into all of the ACSs and then they've made it a required thing that we cover in the CFI initials. So those two are really important. And then we basically get to pick from four, we have to pick one of these. So we're going to cover all of them and you need to know all of them, but you need to know going into the test that you're probably not going to be evaluated on all of them. Now, there are some examiners out there that still evaluate all of them and they're not technically incorrect. They are going above and beyond what the ACS demands, but we have that

18:05discretion as an evaluator. We can do over all of these. I think that's where we hear about some of these 12 hour long oral exams. Yeah, the oral exam definitely would be 12 hours long if we had to demonstrate every single task. And the PTS was kind of like that. In the PTS, if you picked area of operation one task A, you had to evaluate everything on the page. So notice all of these knowledge topics, the risk management skills, you had to do everything. Well, the ACS isn't like that. We just have to do one knowledge, one risk management, and then all of the skills. So you can get things done much more efficiently with the ACS and not have a 12 hour oral. I think some evaluators are still out there giving 12 hour orals. I'm sorry if you have to deal with that, but that's just the way it is. You know, they're not technically incorrect. Okay, so let's dive in to area of operation one task A. So this task is titled effects of human behavior and communication

19:06on the learning process. A couple of things about this. I'll reiterate this several times, but all of the information that we talk about here is in the aviation instructor handbook. So the 10 chapters of the aviation instructor handbook distilled into six tasks. And this specific task has two chapters of the aviation instructor handbook. We have chapter two, which is human behavior. So I've got a link here that takes me to chapter two of the aviation instructor handbook. And then chapter four, which is effective communication. So we have two chapters here covered in one task. And the funny thing is each of these would be like an entire year worth of study on their own in college, right? You could take a human behavior's class at college that would probably stretch over two semesters and the thing for the same thing for communication at least one semester, right? So the fact that it's, you know, distilled into one task, man, that's just so much information.

20:12And honestly, it's a little disappointing to me because I think communication is really important. And the communication is giving four really just three knowledge topics, but I don't want to get distracted again and get on another soapbox about how the FAA is handling this. So let's start up at the top, knowledge topic one, elements of human behavior, including, and there's a lot like this in the FOIs. So that's a one knowledge element. And that's really not expecting you to have knowledge of anything. It just starts the sub elements. So underneath knowledge topic one, we have six, say, five sub elements. So K1A is definitions of human behavior. B is instructor and learner relationship. C is motivation. D, human needs. And E are defense mechanisms. So in the ACE guide next to each one of these lines, I have a green box. And that takes you directly to the page of the aviation instructor handbook where this is discussed. So definitions

21:16of human behavior, you click that box. It takes you to chapter two of the aviation instructors handbook where it has the definitions of human behavior. So essentially what the FAA is testing here is they want to make sure that you can, you know, roughly define what human behavior means. And, you know, again, that's a really complicated thing. Just having a working knowledge of it, if you want to memorize the definition, that's fine. But I'll say again, I don't think that having that definition memorized necessarily makes you a better instructor. It may make you more successful at the specific kind of checkride. But remember what I'm evaluating here is the application level of this knowledge. I'm not really concerned with the wrote memorization level of knowledge here. I'm worried about the application level. I had a very experienced person at the FAA who's who used to give the CFI exam when the FAA was the only one that could give this exam. And they would start the CFI exam oral by saying, give me the definition of human behavior and the CFI

22:21applicant would just spout out from memory the definition of human behavior. And she would say, okay, very good. Now what type of learning did you just demonstrate? And they would say, should say, very good. Correct. Now this exam is not about wrote memorization. This is about the application level, right? I want you to be able to correlate all this information and apply it in a real world scenario. So even though you spend a lot of time memorizing all the stuff, I don't really care about that. What I care about is that you can apply it to a real world situation and actually teach somebody something. That's what I care about. Okay, so definitions of human behavior. This is all in chapter two. The instructor learning orner relationship. So that is the next paragraph after definitions of human behavior. It's kind of a sub paragraph there. Then we go to motivation. Of course, motivation has its own section here. It goes from page 2-2 over to 2-4 and continues there. So then we have human needs. So the human needs and motivation.

23:25That's where we get the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. A lot of, I think there's some acronyms out there. And this is a great example of having a wrote memorization, I think, is one thing, but being able to apply it is another. So you could have wrote memorization of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and you can take courses on this, whatever you want. If you have it memorized, that's great. But then if I present to you a scenario where clearly a student is distracted by maybe stuff happening outside of the cockpit, maybe in their family life or they're coming to you after a long day of work, do you recognize the fact that there's the hierarchy of needs that you need to make sure is being fulfilled as an instructor so they can actually reach the level of learning and absorb all the information that you're giving them. That's the application level that I'm looking for. And then finally, K1E is defense mechanisms. And again, this takes you directly to

24:27your defense mechanisms or your repression denial compensation. I'm sure there's a great acronym out there to help you memorize this. I'll keep saying this though. That's not something that I'm going to test. I'm not going to say, hey, applicant, what are all the defense mechanisms? And the reason I'm not asking that question is the FAA kind of tells us not to ask questions that way. Again, back into the 8900.1. It's in the first chapter in general on how to give an exam. It says that we are to use scenario-based evaluation to the maximum extent possible. So just to give you a source for this, this is coming from the 8900.1 volume 5 chapter 2 section 1. That's kind of the mouthful to say, I've made it a little easier to navigate. If you were to go over to the vsl.arrow website and tap on menu, you can go to FAA 8900. And it will take you to this page, which makes navigation kind of really easy. You just click on general. That's where we're going.

25:29And this pulls up exactly the 8900.1 volume 5 chapter 2 section 1. So on this document on page 9 is actually where it talks about how we are to use the scenario. So right here, we've got training evaluation SRM skills. So a scenario is a flight that the applicant could and may do with the certificate or rating they are seeking. So in this case, it would be the CFI. Then in this next paragraph, the scenario should be something that the applicant may want to do. And it should provide opportunities to complete various tasks required in the appropriate PTS ACS. If the scenario is something the applicant is likely to do, it is likely that the applicant will take a real interest in making the flight and will not simply treat it as a training or evaluation exercise. So FAA clearly wants us to use scenario based evaluation when we're giving these tests. And so rather than ask you just a name off the defense mechanisms, it would be better for me as an evaluator to give you a scenario where a simulated student is giving you some sort of

26:34defense mechanisms. So after your first flight, for instance, they blame the bad landing that they had on the plane saying, well, this plane is just notorious. It floats all the time. You know, well, that's clearly a defense mechanism. And I may ask you, well, if you had to label that, what type of defense mechanism would you call that? And in this case, that might be an example of rationalization. And even if you couldn't exactly remember what is this called, you know, hey, you labeled it a defense mechanism. That's good. You are correct. Now, what can we do to make the learner realize that, you know, hey, it wasn't the plane's fault. It's actually maybe you're deficient in training a little bit. So now we're actually incorporating some communication skills on how do we communicate and get the learner to realize or the student pilot to realize that what just happened, no, it was actually their fault. They needed to take ownership of that. And there's things that we can do to fix it because there's not anything we can do to fix an airplane, right? I'm not an aeronautical engineer. I can't redesign an airplane's wing.

27:36If it was actually designed to float down the runway, which it wasn't, it's just that you're mismanaging your airspeed. And I need to get you to that realization. And so understanding that, oh, that's a defense mechanism. Okay, I need to change the angle that I'm approaching this to make them realize that no, it wasn't the plane's fault. It was their fault. And now how am I going to have them go through some sort of self-assessment and grade them and then provide the additional instruction needed to get them to the right place where they need to be. Anyway, that's just an example. We'll talk more about scenarios here shortly. Okay, so back to the ACS. We're done with that first, the elements of human behavior. So the release, there's just four tasks associated with that. Then we're on to the next knowledge topic, which is learner emotional reactions, including, again, this is knowledge topic two. And then just like knowledge topic one, there's five sub elements. So sub element one is K2A, anxiety and stress. Click on this. It takes you to

28:39chapter two of the aviation instructor handbook, which talks about the learner emotional reactions. And it starts out with anxiety. That's a real common one for a learner to have anxiety. If if you're an instructor long enough, you've seen it. Man, I see it has an examiner all the time. Every single applicant basically demonstrates some format of anxiety during a test. So then we have impatience. That's right below anxiety there. Worry or lack of interest. It takes us to the next page. Then we have the physical discomfort, illness, fatigue, dehydration. That's right there on 2-13 of the aviation instructor handbook. And then finally, we have the apathy due to inadequate instruction. Ooh, that one cuts deep, right? It's hey, they have apathy about it because you're a crappy instructor. That's one that you don't want to have happen. But you could run into that as an instructor. I've run into that before as well, where they've received poor instruction before

29:40and they just kind of checked out and they think, man, this flying just isn't what it is. I'm just not making any progress and they can become apathetic pretty quickly because they weren't getting the right level of instruction. So hopefully this isn't you providing the poor instruction. It's somebody else that provided poor instruction. And now you're left with the student pilot or the learner as the FAA would say, that needs some sort of corrective action to happen. Okay, then we're on to knowledge topic three. That's the teaching the adult learner. Don't worry, we'll get back to the video shortly. I just wanted to do a quick advertisement for the VSL ACE guide. If you're unfamiliar with it, you're probably seeing me use it on some of my videos, including the one you're watching right now. Essentially, it's an FAA reference library. I've taken all of the major FAA handbooks, advisory circulars, legal interpretations, airman certification documents, and practical test standards and combine them into one reference system. I've added navigation links to make it easy to navigate and it's optimized to be used on mobile devices. It will work

30:43on Android, it will work on iOS, it will work within for flight, or if you don't run for flight, it will work on any major PDF reader. We're up to version 6.9 on the main ACE guide and I'd like to introduce a new product and that is the VSL sport guide. The mosaic changes that happened last year are going to have a major impact on how we train and specifically how we train for the sport pilot certificate. Now, since the sport pilot environment kind of exists in parallel to the rest of the certificates that are out there, I decided to publish an ACE guide that is targeted specifically at the sport pilot. Most of the information that you know and love in the VSL ACE guide is also available in the sport ACE guide, but it's a smaller document and doesn't have a lot of the instrument stuff, the ATP, the CFI information and is again targeted at the sport pilot. Check out our website VSL.Aero for more information on both of these guides and I would really appreciate it if you consider supporting the show by purchasing it. Now, let's get back to the video.

31:46Now, that's the end of chapter 2 here, teaching the adult learner. It just has some bullet points. Man, I wish they would spend more time talking about teaching an adult learner because this is something that you will likely do if you're a CFI long enough and it's different than other forms of teaching. If you're teaching a student pilot in a 141 program and they're living in the school housing and all they're doing is eat, sleep and breathe, aviation, that's a form of instruction that has its own challenges and its own skill set, but I would say it's relatively easy compared to teaching maybe an adult learner that has a full-time job. Maybe they're a successful business owner, they purchased an airplane, they've got a family, they've got all these external pressures that you have to kind of navigate as a flight instructor and still get them to learn effectively. Also, their brain chemistry just isn't as malleable as a younger person's brain

32:50chemistry and I don't know, I'm not a brain surgeon, so I don't know if that's accurate. I'd say something I've heard and I've experienced myself as an older person. It just becomes harder to learn new things. Teaching adult learners, that's another skill set that's kind of difficult. I find that a lot of my CFI applicants struggle with this because they are not older themselves. They're younger people and they've been around younger people and they've come out of the school system relatively short time ago and so that's what they're used to. They're just used to non-adult learning and so a lot of my CFI scenarios, if you've taken your CFI exam with me, my initial scenario is that you have to get this older person that has it flown in 15 years and they just purchased an airplane. You have to get them, you know, basically knock the rest off and get them re-qualified to fly and that brings in this element of teaching an adult learner. Okay, now we're on to knowledge topic four and it's just like knowledge topic one and two and

33:52it has sub-elements. In this case, it only has three sub-elements and this is the one that I kind of disappointed in because this all comes out of chapter four which is effective communication and maybe there's some irony here that the FAA spent very little time communicating about the communication chapter. So we have essentially an entire chapter in the aviation instructor handbook boiled down in two three knowledge topics. We have the basic elements for communication barriers to effective communication and developing communication skills. Now let's look at the developing communication skills because I think this has the the section of the chapter four that I think will give you the most bang for your buck as a CFI in training. So on page four dash six that's where developing communication skills starts and on the next page basically the first paragraph it talks about is role playing. So role playing right here I think man that is the absolute best way

34:53for you to develop communication skills as a CFI. So you want initially you start out role playing, you want your CFI to play the role of a new student and you want to practice teaching them that that's a very easy way to get started on this. When I was doing a CFI Academy I did a few of these at VSL when we were operating the school full-time and I may do them again in the future because I think they're a lot of fun but but anyway what I would have been doing this comes straight from Air Force training is the first day within the first hour I give you the first assignment and the first assignment is hey you have 30 minutes you need to go prepare a 15-minute lesson on how to do something and the ground rules are you can use any method of teaching if you want to make PowerPoint slides that's great if you want to use a whiteboard full if you just want a lecture it's totally up to you I don't care but the main rule is it cannot be about aviation it can be about anything else but it can't be about aviation and I just want you to to teach

35:56me something that's that's all I want you to do. So I'm immediately forcing you into the role of a teacher and you're going to role play that of a teacher and what it does it does a few things and one it gets you out there speaking in front of people and public speaking is like a really common fear among everybody you know but especially in this environment and especially where you're coming to a checkride with an examiner that you may have never met before you're kind of intimidated by you're not wanting to fail a checkride and you're having to teach them now clearly they're a more qualified aviators than you are because they're an examiner and so that right there it feels a little awkward but the ACS says that you have to do that you're providing the lesson so all I'm saying is if you haven't role played that of a teacher and you haven't stood up in front of people and gotten yourself a little uncomfortable in practice teaching then how do you think you're going to feel on the day of the checkride when you have to sit in front of me and teach me something that I probably already know right you're going to have to role play that

37:01and and so this role playing I think is really important and it's underutilized we need to do more of this I think role playing is just another way of saying scenario based training and obviously the FAA thinks scenario based training and scenario based evaluation is helpful and they want to do more of it but they only have this one knowledge topic that's really addressing that and then there's other ways to develop effective communication but I'll just reiterate this communication is a skill that needs to be practiced you need to go out and practice communication I don't consider myself to be the best communicator ever and I'm still practicing it in fact the video or podcast you're listening to right now the words I'm speaking right now I have already said before and I've deleted it because manager just wasn't up to speed I practice this all the time I haven't perfected it and I don't think I'll ever perfect it my communication delivery needs a lot of work I've been told I'm as dry as my mother-in-law's pot roast whatever that means I think it's a disc I don't know so we can

38:06all work on our communication skills but the main thing I want to point out here is it takes practice you have to practice communicating to be better at it and if you spend a lot of time by yourself memorizing the FOIs you're not spending time practicing applying the FOIs and I think that's what we really need to be doing is practice applying those all right now we're to the risk management section we have two risk management elements the first is recognizing and accommodating human behavior so the green button here takes us to chapter two human behavior and then risk management item two are to take us to barriers of communication and this takes us to chapter four-four of communication section and that's the barriers to effective communication again I know there's I know there's an acronym out there to have you memorize the the different things of barriers to effective communication it's not something that I'm going to say me personally as an examiner I'm not going to say hey give me the barriers to effective

39:09communication list them off in order no I'm going to give you a scenario that forces you to basically label those identify and be able to label them all right now finally we are on to these skills section now as a reminder the skills section you have to demonstrate every single one of these skills so all the knowledge topics we talked about and the the two risk management topics we talked about you only have to demonstrate at least one of each of those so you don't have to do all of them now you have to do one of each and or the ones that you missed on the FOI exam so one in one of knowledge and risk management and all of the skills so in the skills for area of operation one task a we have five skills listed but really there's only four because skill one is give examples of how human behavior affects motivation and learning okay that's a pretty cut and dry skill that we have to demonstrate but skill two is describe what the instructor can do to deal with colon so that's skill two and then we have two sub elements we have skill S2A

40:14and S2B so really skill two is two things and then we have skill three so in total we only have four skills to really demonstrate and so skill S2A is serious abnormal emotional behavior and skill two B is defense mechanisms and then skill S3 is use effective communication in ground and flight instruction so if I were preparing for any checkride the thing I would recommend is actually start with the skills so we start with the skills and we design a scenario that addresses all of these skills so if I'm a CFI that's actually preparing somebody for their CFI exam or if I'm a commercial pilot getting ready for my CFI exam let's just talk through how I might prepare for area of operation one task a so looking at these four skills we need to demonstrate proficiency

41:16we can kind of play around that role play if you will with a scenario so I did some short content recently that talked through kind of a three part talk through a scenario so let's just say you get an email from a potential client maybe they got your number from the FBO you left a business card out somewhere you post on social media however they find out about you it doesn't really matter they reach out to you and say hey I would like to get back into flying I haven't flown in about 10 years I used to own an airplane I don't anymore but I've found this local flying club that I'm looking to join and they have a SESTA 172 and I would really like to get checked out in that 172 and just start flying again now maybe there's a couple family trips that I would like to do this summer and anyway I would love to work with you what do you think so that's the email that you get so you've got a lot of things to handle here right we've got to unpack this and figure

42:17out okay what's my plan to handle this scenario so I've got an adult learner they already know how to fly they already have their pilots license it sounds like but there's some basic questions that I need to ask okay they didn't give me nearly enough information in this email to kind of proceed forward so first off I would want to ask hey yeah let's let's meet up and maybe do a document where we need to sit down and look at your logbook we need to look at all your pilot certificates or your pilot certificate we need to make sure that you're medically qualified right do you still hold a medical are you doing basic mad are you qualified for basic mad then we need to look at the airplane that you're potentially flying and make sure that it's it's all airworthy and stuff and maybe talk to somebody from the flight school make sure that I'm good to teach you on their insurance policy or if you need to go out and find another instructor for our scenario let's just say hey we're legal to teach in this airplane for this flying club that that they're in so as we're sitting here role playing this what are you doing

43:21you're using communication okay you're literally using communication skills and talking to me so in addition to demonstrating some basic communication skills I'm forcing you as the CFI applicant to address some other stuff so I'm introducing kind of the foundation of this scenario where our person here that wants to receive instruction they have some motivating factors right they want to get back into flying so another question we could ask is well why do you want to get back into flying and in the discussion here as we're role playing this I as the DPE may say hey I'm role playing that of the student you're talking to and they asked the question well hey why did you get out of flying or what makes you want to get back into flying you could ask it you know in different ways and I tell you well basically 10 years ago I owned a 172 and you know a darkness stormy night I was flying and I wound up having an accident or runway excursion it really wasn't my fault it was you know the airplane hydroplained and I thought I saw a deer or something went off flipped over

44:27it was pretty traumatic for me and my family we got away with minor injuries but I just haven't touched an airplane since and I think I've built up enough confidence now I'm ready to get back in okay so I've just created this triggering event for you to basically as the CFI applicant you need to start okay processing all the information others gave you okay this guy crashed an airplane he's saying it wasn't his fault he's not taking ownership of that so already we're seeing some clues here on how we can apply the FOIs from human behavior right we might be seeing some defense mechanisms and so I may jump out of character and say okay well you know here I'm asking you as the DPE what did our pretend person here what are they demonstrating and you can say well well clearly they have some defense mechanisms they're not taking ownership of the accident so we really need to dig into that accident probably and see if we can help them realize well this may be

45:29the root cause maybe your decision to fly in you know adverse conditions so maybe there's some aeronautical decision making that wasn't correctly made and getting the learner to realize that and take ownership of that that may be the first goal that I have as a CFI before I even begin to take them and I could go on to say if I can't make them realize and basically take some form of ownership of that accident then that may be basically an abnormal emotional behavior and I may not even want to take on of this student or instead of not taking on the student I may want to bring in another experience CFI to help us work through this okay so let's just pause right there the little scenario that we just gave and talked for just a few minutes let's see how many skills and knowledge topics we addressed and demonstrated proficiency in so the last part there the serious abnormal emotional behavior we click on that and the flight instructors actions regarding serious

46:32abnormal learners right here it says if a flight instructor believes the learner may have a disqualifying physiological defect arrangements should be made for another instructor who's not acquainted with the learner to conduct an evaluation flight so I just demonstrated proficiency exactly how we're supposed to deal with abnormal emotional behavior right if you run into a student that's just you can't fix it get another instructor to come in and kind of do an evaluation on that and then your primary legal responsibility on the decision of whether or not endorsed or learner to complete a solo flight operation make a recommendation for practical test leading to certification of a pilot so basically what this paragraph is saying like if if you aren't comfortable with this student because of the way that they're thinking about things or the way they're approaching their training then you don't have to sign them off like that's your legal responsibility not to give an endorsement to somebody if you don't believe that they can safely operate the airplane and this

47:35is a great little scenario here because the guy crashed an airplane he's not taking ownership of it so what's to say he's going to go make the same exact mistake again if we can't get him to understand that it was his lack of ADM that maybe led to the event or at least it was a contributing factor right so he needs to take some sort of ownership towards that so we've definitely handled that I think that's okay we've we've done that we've done defense mechanisms we've used effective communication on the ground because we tried to develop that same background right we asked questions of our learner after that initial email they didn't provide us with enough information we reached out and asked applicable questions to kind of figure out okay let's start at the same foundation you know because he has his experience we have our experience we need to to blend those together using effective communication so we've we've done that so we've already knocked out three of the four skills and then give examples of how human behavior affects motivation and learning

48:35well that one's a little squishy but obviously if we can get past the fact let's say that we can get him to understand and take ownership of that accident and now we're back on the path of okay let's talk about how to make good ADM let's talk about energy management let's talk about you know maybe the the skill part of landing an aircraft on a wet surface and how that's changing our breaking conditions and you know we can get into a flight lesson about that but finally we get him there and he wants to do these family trips so he has a motivating factor he wants to use aviation to enhance his life right so we have clear motivation here how can we leverage that motivation to make them take the training seriously right that's how we can kind of leverage that motivation to to get effective learning in there there's again that's a squishy one we can play with that several different ways in the scenario but the basic thing I'm trying to point out is with a relatively simple scenario I was able to evaluate all four of the skill elements now remember

49:41I wanted you to start with the skill elements now let's look at the knowledge topics in risk management remember we only have to cover one knowledge topic and we have to cover one risk management topic so did our scenario cover at least one knowledge and one risk management well up at the knowledge we've got defense mechanisms that was one of the knowledge topics hey yeah we could call that complete uh we would probably deal with some sort of anxiety and stress we could roleplay that out of hey they're nervous of getting back in the airplane how are you handling that right they're hierarchy of needs when you ask them when they can train and they say well we can only do that after work well that brings up a problem of fatigue so we've got the physical discomfort illness fatigue that's non-topic K2D so we could say hey we've addressed that here's how we're going to handle that and our appropriate way might be well let's can you take uh take off early one day so we can meet up uh maybe halfway through the day so you're not as fatigued

50:42or let's take this training event that might last three or four hours and break it up over three or four days rather than try to get it done at one sitting did you do something to address the fact that fatigue might be an issue did you do something to address the fact that the applicant might or the student might have some sort of anxiety about getting back in the airplane after having crashed it had did you know did you make some uh address of that and then teaching the adult learner okay we've got this whole section hey they're clearly an adult learner are you taking into account all the the the things that it talks about here on page 2-17 looking at some of these so adult learners motivated to seek out learning experiences do so primarily because they have a use for the knowledge or skill being sought learning is a means to an end not the end itself so they want to use this plane to go out and and do travel maybe easier maybe they have young kids and they don't like going through TSA and rain about the the different seats in the plant so it's

51:46like well we can just fly ourselves there you know art so they're basically so basically they have different motivations instead of a traditional student pilot that just says well I want to learn how to fly an airplane because I want to go to the airlines you know are you able to address that and leverage that to to be a more effective instructor so we could say we've we've covered one of those and then as you can see here we've already in addressing our scenario we've addressed some of these knowledge topics already and then effective communication okay the basic elements of communication we could we easily demonstrate that under our initial handling of that scenario are we establishing that communication are we breaking down kind of that generic language and getting to the specifics on you know what are your qualifications do you have your medical do you have your pilot certificate you know saying I did some flight training or some flying or I was in this accident okay we need more specifics right those generalizations aren't going to cut it we

52:49need to develop a good plan of action and to do that we need more hard facts so we're establishing that two-way communication and getting drilling down further to the fundamental of what we need to know to provide you with good training and then barriers to effective communication and developing communication skills we could say we've I would say definitely we've covered at least one knowledge topic right and we've covered one of the risk management topics because that's recognizing and accommodating human behavior so again the human behavior they were demonstrating was they were using defense mechanisms and not taking ownership of that accident so how are we going to address that what's your plan for that when you're answering this and so let's just talk about that what would my plan be if I were sitting here and getting this scenario as an applicant how would I address this so first and foremost we want to really get the communication down we want to clearly get a clear picture of how this accident played out what exactly happened let's think

53:54about the weather can almost like an accident analysis if there's an NTSB report I would want my hands on that NTSB report and then we look at everything right we we get the facts and we tell our student okay here's the facts it was at night on a wet runway in a single engineer craft so talk me through basically how did you get there why did you accept the higher risk of flying at night and then in poor weather conditions so what what led to that I would want to figure out how they basically got themselves in that situation and the more I let them talk about that situation the more opportunity I give them to help them realize the fact that yeah maybe that wasn't the best decision and so I do do that by asking them questions kind of evaluating them as an instructor you can evaluate you can critique so let's kind of we're not getting there yet in the FOIs but that learner centered grading I'm letting them grade themselves so asking them just

54:58if you were to do it all over again what would you do differently what do you think you could have done that would have led to a different outcome and if they say well I could have landed better well that's not a great answer what else you know clearly at night wet conditions in a single engineer craft is that the best idea you know we you know maybe take your experience as a CFI say and that hey even myself as a CFI and this is true Seth Lake talking I am very hesitant to fly single engine at night and I've got thousands of hours I've got a lot of experience in different aircraft and even myself I'm really hesitant to fly a single engineer craft at night especially in poor weather conditions because you're just quickly you know painting yourself into a corner as it were just not giving a lot of room for error or options for escape you know basically to to go do something else so one of the things I would be listening for is for them to realize

56:01okay yeah maybe it would be a better idea if I would have gotten a hotel and left gotten a good night's rest and left the next day yeah I'm freshly rested the weather has improved and it's daylight now the chances of me having a bad outcome on that landing are way down right I've removed a lot of those external factors and and hopefully things would have a better outcome and I'd be like yeah bingo that that is what we mean by aeronautical decision making is we want you to make decisions that are more likely to result in a good outcome rather than you know get have the get theiritis of okay well why did I why was that there at night but because our plans ran long and we left the airport much later than we had planned well that tells me two things one you're gonna fly at night two you're probably fatigued because you got up that morning you went out and did an activity whatever maybe you went to a wedding maybe you were at a theme park or whatever you got out of there late so now not only is it nighttime poor weather conditions but you're also fatigued

57:06so staying over at night that that solves a lot of problems it solves the fatigue problem it solves the night problem and hopefully it solves the the poor weather problem because the weather will have improved on the next day so that's how I would kind of role play that scenario out now just me talking about that as a CFI I've proven to the examiner that I have application level of all this stuff in task a right I didn't spit off definitions but hopefully you'll agree with me if you don't please leave your comments in this video or the podcast but personally I believe if I were to answer that question that scenario to an evaluator the way I just talked about it that that shows that I have the application level of the effects of human favorite this task that I am able to apply them okay that's my belief that's that's what I think the goal of this

58:06ACS is now feel free to you know give me criticisms here in St. Seth that would never fly with the DP that I had they would have me you know recite everything from memory and hey I understand that there's examiners like that out there and there's probably things that I could have done better in my answer you know if you did have more rope memorization of some of the stuff you could kind of sneak in those definitions and you know using those keywords sometimes that's that's important so being able to label the actual defense mechanisms or use one of the terms that of Maslow's hierarchy of needs you can sneak those definitions in there just to prove that you have not only the application level but also the rope memorization one of the things you do need rope memorization for and that's why I'm saying just don't ever do it is when you go to take the FOI exam you do have to have some of these wrote memorized essentially because you're going to get

59:07a multiple choice question and it's going to say hey choose from the following which one is not one of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs well that's clearly wrote level of knowledge that's not application level so the written exams are all about kind of that wrote memorization when you get to the practical test the practical test is not and that's all I'm trying to say here is for the practical test we are not supposed to be testing wrote level of knowledge we're supposed to be testing the application the correlation level which means we need to use some sort of scenario based evaluation anyway let me know what you think about in the comments let if there's anything else you would like me to cover in these episodes I would love to hear about it if you found it helpful the plan is we're going to go on and do all six areas of operation now if you're looking at this video here I've got basically version 6.9 of the ACE guide so I will be releasing this very

1:00:09and as I go through these episodes I'll be releasing updated versions of the ACE guide that have the enhanced links to the fundamentals of instruction and the aviation instructors handbook there's a couple of other things that I've I've made if you skipped through the commercial so let's just I'll show you real quick what some of the upgrades are in 6.9 let's use the private palette ACS as an example let's say you're studying area of operation one and weather information that's a pretty thick one and all these green buttons will take you to a section of the aviation weather handbook but that's not always really clear so now what I've added is let's say you're going to study clouds you click on that it takes you to the appendix a of clouds but in the top in between the back button on the global menu you'll see a watermark that says aviation weather handbook so wherever you're at in the aviation weather handbook you can look up right there and you can see oh that's the handbook that I'm in it does the same thing for the p-hack we'll just click on a basic page of the p-hack and

1:01:11I've got the p-hack acronym that's the only one I used an acronym for because it's too long for the the text to fit airplane flying handbook again if you're in there plane flying hand but you have the watermark there so I've I've added those into the the ACE guide to make it easier to navigate there so that along with some other things that I've added in there and the change log is posted so check out version 6.9 if you haven't if you have version 6.8 and you haven't got an email send me an email and say hey Seth I need a download link for 6.8 or 6.9 check your spam folder because a lot of times this will send out and it will get categorized as spam so it's just sitting there in your spam folder but you get a fresh 10 downloads with every update so 6.9s out now 7.0 will be coming here shortly so you know if you're reading this make sure you go to the vsl.arrow website and then it will have the current information and then I'll try to put a button there to request an updated link there as well so anyway thank you so much for watching and interacting

1:02:17I really appreciate all the messages I get emails I get responses on the comments section of all the social media but I really do appreciate that it helps me keep motivated to help keep putting out content so anyway thank you so much and I'll see you soon