In this episode we learn why dive professionals should adopt the saying “your next class is always your best class.”
Welcome to The Dive Locker podcast, the podcast for dive professionals where we bring you the latest and diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management, and dive business.
I’m your host Tec Clark and welcome to this episode everybody. Oh, here we are, second week of January, 2020 and it was put on my heart to share with you something that is a mantra of mine and I got it in my instructor course. That mantra is “your next class is always your best class.” So long, long time ago when I became an instructor, I had a wonderful instructor trainer by the name of David Fine. David had a lot of great pearls of wisdom and wonderful experiences. He was a fantastic instructor trainer, but one of the things that he said that really stuck out was his insistence that you always live by this motto, this creed, this mantra, whatever you want to call it, of your next class is always your best class. Now after working in that program and using that mantra and the whole dive staff following that same mantra on their hearts and minds, we excelled to greatness.
In fact, we were the top academic diving program in the country in terms of legendary status, what we did, the numbers of students we had, uh, it was just fantastic. And so this was part of it was that there was always this continual pursuit of excellence. And since that time, I have implemented this mantra in every dive training institution that I’ve ever worked, and you can see remarkable, remarkable changes and progress when you adopt this. So let’s take a look at what this is about because it’s just not cliche. It’s just not this Oh, pursuit of excellence and whatever. You’ve heard that so many times. No, no, no. There’s actually a method. There is a method to adopting the mantra of your next class is always your best class. So what we’re going to do is take a look at this. I’ve got five steps for you guys to take note of that.
You can really adopt this. You can share this in your dive centers. You can do this on your dive boats, you can do this in any, any genre any area of your dive profession that you want to explore this. You could switch the word “class” for “trip”. Your next trip is always your best trip if you’re doing dive travel, you know you can do whatever. But the solid foundation of this is, is born from the teaching aspect of it. And so when you think about it in our teaching aspect, we’ve got all these areas that we teach in, right? So the majority of our courses, the majority of, of what we teach in diving are going to involve classroom, confined water and open water training. So when we look at this, each one of those areas can be improved from class to class.
So what we can do is come up with a framework and a strategy that helps you look at each one of those areas that then improves on each of those areas, then makes your entire class overall improve. And so that’s what we’re going to look at now. So number one is we want to adopt this. Get it out there, tell everybody about it. Your next class is always your best class. Get that posted, put it in your break room, put it in your classroom, put it wherever you want to put it so that your staff is being reminded of this. So here are the principles to help make your next class your best class always.
1. Evaluate Every Class
Number one is evaluate every class. Now what do I mean by that? Well, here’s what we do. At the end of every pool session, at the end of every classroom, at the end of every open water, we will sit as a staff, whoever’s there, whether it’s one divemaster helping us or whether it’s divemasters in training or whether it’s two instructors, co-teaching, whatever. We will debrief. And that debrief is an evaluation because we bring out this question that says, “how can we do better?” So first we ask, Hey, what went right and what could we improve upon? We learn what went right. And that’s pretty cool. That usually is because we did some proper planning and preparing and, and it worked. Right? That’s awesome. But what can we do better is the heart and soul of your next class is always your best class. So what can we do better is asked about, but guess what – it’s asked about through the student’s eyes.
We want to be student focused here and we want to think how to improve based on them. Not us necessarily, but them. So what’s it going to be like when we sit back and say, all right, for the students in this pool session, you know, they watched these lap swimmers swimming behind us. I should have been in a different position in the pool so that I minimize that distraction of those lap swimmers swimming behind us. That’s just one example, right? So it really isn’t about me because I taught the same thing underwater. I did the exact same stuff. It’s not about me. It’s about the student, looking through their eyes. They’re distracted. Now how did I know that? Because I could see their eyes glancing up occasionally behind me. Right? And so if you’ve got a college coed doing a flip turn every so many seconds, that can be distracting.
So there you go. Evaluate every class is your big one to do. Now I also think about what can we do in the classroom session? Well, think about this. Let’s say you’re going along and you are teaching, you know, just the same stuff you’ve always taught. Well, wait a minute, isn’t there a different way to do this? Let’s say that you went long on something and you missed a bathroom break. That would have been nice, and then you started to notice that students were getting up and going to the bathroom. Well then what you can do is write in your notes for the next time, you actually put in your slides in your slide deck. Hey, here’s a bathroom break so that you have a reminder that there’s going to be a break, and our agencies don’t do that. When we’re going through our slide deck and our PowerPoint presentations and whatnot, they don’t have a little blank slide that says take a break, go to the bathroom, whatever.
You should do that yourself. So that’s a great way to keep on track and to keep things going. And that helps you with the next time. Also, you may get to a class and you might come right there because you always do it and everything’s just the normal, but then the classroom isn’t set up properly. Now all of a sudden you’re kind of scrambling, instead of you’re pulling up your slides and getting things ready, you’re now having to rearrange the classroom. So there’s your note for the next time. But Hey, I need to get there earlier than I normally do because the classroom is prone to not being set upright. So all you do is constantly evaluate, constantly evaluate. And when you bring it through the student’s eyes, you start to evaluate differently. Great example. So think about this. When we are taking people through knowledge reviews and they’re going through their books and they’re reading knowledge reviews or whatever, and you want to use an example and you point to page 57 look at this and look at that.
Wait a minute. Instead of looking at the pictures that they’ve seen in the book already, and instead of looking at the pictures, that’s, you know, on the video or projector or whatnot, have something to pass around. So if it’s shells, if it’s coral, if it’s equipment, whatever, you can be creative, pass things around, let it be tangible instead of just pictures. So this is a way to evaluate the class and go, Hey wait, student-centered wise, is this the best learning that they can get? Well, continue to think about the best learning what will work great here. And that would be awesome. So when we do those confined water and those open water sessions, and now you know, I don’t know about you, but I come away from them even after 30 years of teaching scuba, and I go, “ah, I should have done this and I should have done that and I should have done this and I should’ve done that” and I wind up should’ve all over myself.
Right? So what you don’t want to do is get into that. Instead you want to go, all right, wait, this is a teachable moment for me. That should have what I should’ve done. Remember for the next time you see? Because the more experience that we have, then the more cues that we’re going to take. So when we have confined water sessions, like what I mentioned with distractions in the background or whatnot, but what about open water? There’s so many variables. It could be the weather, it could be current waves, surf tides, visibility buddy teams, your divemaster or your assistant instructor, the boat type that you’re on, what shore support you have. And then what other external distractions there are. Your experience in all of this actually helps you for the next time. So if you’re new to teaching and whatnot and all of a sudden you have gone down to the same wreck and you’re doing your same skills on the same wreck, all of a sudden one day, the visibility is horrible and the current is strong.
I can’t do these same skillsets here. So you make changes. So once you start to experience that, then you can approach those variables ahead of time and look for that by an evaluation method that says, “wait, the last time we were at this site, it had this current, I need to come up with a contingency place to take my students to do their skillsets so that I’m already prepared for that if I need to.” So this is what it’s all about. And again, the heart and soul of this is to debrief, find out what was good and what needs improving. That is the key to evaluating every class.
2. Preparation
Number two is preparation. Now how many of you jump into your class? Just go right? Especially those of you that have been doing it a long time, there’s kinda not, not anything different. And you just show up and you go. Well, wait a minute, I’m going to challenge you here. Think about that. If you can get into a frame of mind, you will actually be better at your delivery, better at your passion, better at your student contact, because you’ve prepped yourself, right? It’s, it’s kind of focusing. And so when I stand up from my desk and I have to go into a classroom and I wind up getting in there and teaching, you know, I’m still on that, that my, my mind is like the hard drive that’s still winding down from the emails that I was doing. You know, you’re probably the same way. Instead, what we want to do is not in front of students, ramp up in the new area that we’re, we’re about to teach. No, we want to get onboard with that ahead of time. So my recommendation in preparation is look at notes, preview slides, rehearse. There’s nothing wrong with that.
So when I start to do that, all of a sudden I take my 15 to 20 minutes ahead of time before a class and I’ll just sit there before I have to, not in a classroom, but before I go and set up a classroom. I’m literally just looking at notes, refreshing my memory on the things to say, the order of things to say, I’m previewing the slides. Are they running fine? Is my timing fine? Do I need to add anything? Do I need to delete anything? Then for those of you that are new, you might want to rehearse, especially if this is a new course for you. We have students all the time that, we train a lot of instructors in our programs and we get new people that this is the first time they’re going to teach an advanced course. Hey, you need to rehearse.
You’re going to be talking about things you haven’t talked about before. Even in your IDC or your instructor training courses, there’s new stuff that you haven’t gone through. Rehearse so that you can get your timing down and your content down. I write lists that sits on piles for the different classes I teach. I know that sounds weird, right? But here’s the deal. What you do is, well, for me, yeah, I got a cluttered office. I’m going to admit that, but I’ll have piles around for the different courses that I teach. So if over here I’ve got my course for Diving First Aid for Professionals, right? My DAN course for that, and I am going to teach that upcoming in a month. Well, I have that course out, the notes out, the things that I bring for that course, the backpack. Oh, you know, all the good things that I’ve got for it.
And then when I’m going along and I think of something like, Oh, I just read something, or I just found out something or I’m reminded about something, I make a note and I put it on that pile so that that way when I prep for the next class, I get to go and I see these notes. Oh, I forgot about that a month ago. I put this note here to remind me to bring more gloves than usual because I want to do some glove drills. You know, that kind of stuff. So that’s where it gets really cool. I write lists that sit on piles for the different classes that I teach. And so that is a neat way to do that. I encourage you to be creative, be creative in your preparation. And remember what I was saying about evaluate every class and you know, what could you do better?
These are the things that you’ll often just keep thinking about too. It doesn’t just stop in the debrief. You might be going along and go, Hey, that’s a really cool thing for my upcoming divemaster class. I’m going to put that in. So that’s, that’s my, my area of preparation, a huge one. And I think that you’ll find benefit in, in really taking time and preparing for your lectures, pool sessions, and open water dives.
3. Keep Educated
Number three is keep educated. Now how do you keep educated? All right, here’s this fallacy that once you get the instructor level that you’re done, you’ve achieved your peak, you’re, you’re it, right? Your Jacques Cousteau, reincarnated, uh, wrong. So the deal is, is that you want to keep educated. What I say is just always, always be on the lookout for how you can grow. My favorite areas are going to be in periodicals, news items, press releases, and, um, anything that you’re seeing coming through our industry that is media.
This could be podcasts, you know, whatever. But here’s the deal. What you want to do is really pay attention to these things. So for periodicals and, and uh, and magazines and things like that. Think about this. You’ve got your agencies. So most agencies have some type of periodical actual magazine or a newsletter. So you got PADI’s Journal, you got NAUI’s Sources. Um, and then you’ve got niches, niche magazines, and niche publications like AquaCorps. That’s just for technical divers, right? And so there’s a bunch of these out there. So think about the, the different agencies you’re with and the different niches that you’re a part of. Then on a broader sense, there’s Divers Alert Network Alert Diver magazine. Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic magazine. Those of you that are DAN members and I hope all of you are, if you’re not, my goodness, become a DAN member immediately.
If you’re a DAN member, you’re going to get Alert Diver this, this quarterly publication is just fantastic. It’s gorgeous. Stephen Frink does an amazing job as the publisher, so it has everything in it. It’s not just about accident or incident related items that are part of Divers Alert Network or safety. It is everything. It’s travel, it’s safety, it’s research, uh, destinations. It’s great. So, um, I get a lot of information from Alert Diver. The other dive magazines that I absolutely love. Dive Training magazine and Dive Center Business. So Dive Training magazine. Many of you have seen, you even probably get into your dive center and you give it out free to your customers and your students. Well, Dive Training. It’s great for divers, but it’s also great for pros. I totally recommend that you read Dive Training and keep up with the content that’s in it because there are great experts that are writing fantastic knowledge topics that you would also want to know about.
So if you’re handing out, and I I’ve seen this before and it’s kind of a kind of embarrassing, you’re handing out Dive Training magazines and your students are getting them, your, your customers are getting them and then they come and they talk about something that’s in that magazine that you have no idea was in there – that that happens. So keep current in those type of publications. And then Dive Center Business. This one is our closest to our trade publication that we have. Darcy Keiran represent, um, commented on this in our last episode in episode 17, uh, when he was talking about trade magazines that our industry doesn’t really have any kind of trade magazine, but Dive Center Business truly is the closest thing we have to that. And it is fantastic. I’m a regular contributor to it. You’ve probably seen my articles in there and you’re going to have other experts that are talking about how you can succeed and flourish as a business.
I think that that’s a must have for anybody, even independent instructors. You can contact the company from Dive Training, um, to get both Dive Training magazine and Dive Center Business sent to you and to your business. So please do that. If you haven’t done that already or you’re not getting those magazines, please do it now. Another magazine that I really like, Scuba Diver magazine and the U S version of it Destinations, Scuba Diver destinations for the U S market. Remember you’ve heard about this one? This was Mark Evans. My good friend from across the pond over in the UK has this magazine Scuba Diver. It is also a free publication and it is, especially for the U S market, really focused on dive travel and destinations. This one is great because we need to know about destinations, we need to know about the places to go. So this is an example of just all the different magazines that are out there that are available to you as a dive pro.
Well then there’s the digital stuff as well. So yeah, Destinations and Scuba Diver magazine, uh, and Dive Center Business, Dive Training. They all have um, electronic versions of their articles or even the entire publication. So think about that if you like digital. But the other thing is that there are news sites out there like Deeperblue.com. Deeperblue.com is fantastic. It spans everything from free diving to scuba travel, you name it, it’s all in there. It’s absolutely fantastic when you subscribe, you’re going to get daily press releases and news releases and articles and reviews. It’s awesome. So Deeperblue.com I can’t recommend enough. This is a great one to keep on top of things going on in our industry. The other one is DiveNewswire. DiveNewswire you can subscribe to. This is for dive pros only and it’s mostly press releases that are things happening in our industry that you should know about.
So this is good to also be on a subscription with and those will be delivered to your inbox as well. So here’s the thing guys, it’s not good enough just to subscribe to all this stuff. You actually need to read it. So when I teach a rescue course, when I teach a divemaster course, I am sitting here thinking of things and these articles and all of a sudden when I’m going through and reading something, I’ll tear out that or I’ll flag it or I’ll put a, you know, a little post it note that says, Hey, refer to this article when I’m teaching my next divemaster course because it’s great about risk management or whatever. So keep educated. All right?
4. Keep Experienced
And then number four ties off of that, which is keep experienced, keep experience. The worst thing you can do is botched demonstration quality, right? So we say that if you do a skill at 100% your students might actually be able to do that skill at 80% may be all right if you bought your demonstration quality on a skill, now you’re teaching that skill to what 60% 70% you’ve done something wrong, you rushed it, you’ve fumbled whatever. Now what’s your student going to do? They’re going to be dropped down into the 40% or 50% level of skill quality. So you really want to keep experienced, have your skills good, have them ready, ready to go. So if you have been out of rescue for a long time and you haven’t taught rescue, you need to get in and practice it. You need to actually do some of those rescue techniques so that they’re flawless when you show them to your students. Divemaster, right? We talk about divemaster. Well there’s a lot of times we don’t do some of those skills that are in the different agencies, like a buddy breathing gear exchange or a skin diving ditch and recovery, right?
So some of these, different skill sets that we’ll use at the higher level, you may not teach so regularly. Like you do an open water course. So because of that we need to be accomplished. We need to keep experienced so that we’re ready to do that. For me it’s always knots, it’s always knots right. I mean, okay, great. I should know these knots. I do them all the time and yeah, I can do a bowline in my sleep, but when we start getting into the other ones, I go, Hey, wait a minute and I have to brush off some of the, the rust there and practice those knots before I get in front of the class and start doing it. So the more experience you have, the more skill sets you have, the better the educator you’re actually going to be. So keep experienced and then that leads us to number five, our last one.
5. Be A Student
Number five be a student, be a student, never stop learning. So this goes back to that misconception of that once you get your C card as an instructor, that you don’t have to learn any more. No. As we often say, your instructor card is your license to learn. It really is folks. And it doesn’t stop. When you’re an instructor trainer, you need to even learn more. Never stop learning. You know, this is why I look forward to the DEMA show so much because of what I’m going to learn there and what I’m going to walk away with. It’s absolutely great. I, it’s so intense. It’s an intensive. And so when I went to walk away with that, I’m a better dive educator from going to the DEMA show. And by the way, for those of you that did go to DEMA or did not go to DEMA, the DEMA show has posted the recordings of their DEMA sponsored seminars.
So if you missed out on out on them or if you got jazzed about one and you want to show your staff back home, they’re on there. So go check out DEMA show and uh, and sign up to get those recordings. Also, take more courses. You can, you can do more specialties, right? Whether your divemaster and instructor keep getting better, the more courses you have. It’s not about card collecting, it’s not about chevron’s on your patch jacket, right? It’s about making you better. When your better, not only do you get more experience, but here’s the great thing. When you become a student and you take more courses yourself, you actually are gaining teaching techniques, both good and bad from the instructors that are teaching you. So you get to actually get kind of a double benefit by being a student and taking more courses yourself.
And so the last thing that I recommend here is listening to books, reading books, podcasts on leadership, on success, on business, whatever it is. Dear goodness, there are so many out there. I’m a podcast junkie. That’s why I have two podcasts. But I also listen to tons of them and you know, think about this. So you could be teaching a class and you could be referring back to my other podcast, which is the League of Extraordinary Divers. And you could be talking about somebody like Dottie Frazier, who was the first female scuba diver (instructor). And in your class you could talk about the history of diving and you could bring up here’s what the first female divers were like or something like that. I mean, it’s really phenomenal how much you can learn out there. So be a sponge, soak it all in whatever medium you want to study, whatever that’s at.
Just be a sponge, be a student and take it all in. It’s all about better. It’s all about the pursuit of excellence. It’s just simply not good enough, guys and gals, to just do what is in your standards and procedures manual or is in your instructor guide and is in your slides and is in – no, you need to actually pour more into your students than that. They will see right through that. It becomes rehearsed and scripted and blahzay. You want fire, you want passion, so the more that you can be a student, the more passion that you have, the better educator you’re going to be. That means the better your classroom sessions are going to be, the better your confined water pool sessions are going to be and the better your open water dives are going to be guaranteed. This isn’t fufu. I have seen it work.
Your next class is always your best class. Say that. Say that at the end of your dive briefings so that you guys can get there and you can all be a team to be all about getting better and having your students rave about you and your dive program and your classes because of what you’ve done for them and how much different you are. One of the best testimonials of this out there, and maybe you guys have experienced this for us, it’s this way at a big dive program like ours at a college, at a university.
We have students that come in that got trained elsewhere and then they go through our dive program and they go, “Oh my gosh, you guys, this is unbelievable. This was so different than what I did” and on and on and on and that just makes you feel good. And look, folks, I’m not talking. Don’t sit here and go, “Oh, well that’s because you’re a university program and you can, you know, go for weeks” and everything like that. Nope, that’s not it. That’s not it. It’s about how we take attention to the details of making every class our best class. The next class is always your best class. Keep that in mind everybody and you will go far.
Thanks For Listening!
So there you go. You do all that and you guys will be benefiting from the successes of always focusing on excellence. Your next class is always your best class. That’s it for today. Everyone. Thanks so much for listening. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher. That way you’ll be notified of new episodes as soon as they go live and please leave a rating. Items talked about in this episode can be found on the show notes page at scubaguru.com and there you can also click the microphone and leave us a comment. Thanks again. We’ll see you in the next episode. Safe diving and take good care, my friends.
Podcast (thedivelocker): Play in new window | Download | Embed
Subscribe: RSS
