In this episode of The Dive Locker Podcast we learn about the critically important definition and application of skill mastery in Open Water Diver courses.

Welcome To The Show!

Welcome to The Dive Locker Podcast, the podcast for dive professionals where we bring you the latest in diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management and dive business.

Today my friends, I’m fired up. I mean really fired up. Last week I was providing consulting for a gentleman who wanted to become a dive pro and create a dive program at a university. He was talking about referring his students to the dive shop he was working with, and where he would get his training, until the day where he could teach his students himself at his university.

I explained to him that most dive programs at colleges and universities go beyond the standards, they teach more in academics and pool time to be able to give proper credit hours in an eight week, 12 week or 15 week course. And to do that, well, you’re gonna have to develop a course that is more than the one you would have experienced in your training at a dive center. I then explained that for example when he becomes a divemaster in training, he will most likely assist in actual open water diver courses at his dive center.

So I looked up the dive center online and this is where it all unraveled quickly. For this dive center’s open water diver course it states the following:

“After finishing the home study we will meet at the shop for Session 1: the classroom review. After that we move on to Session 2: pool training, which most students complete in one session. Your comfort is key, and additional pool sessions, if needed, are free.” Then it talks about open water dives. But wait, I’m still stuck on this one pool session concept – so how long would this one session be?

When I read further it says this “Session 2: Pool Training. Let’s blow some bubbles! Relaxing and breathing through your mouth is all it takes. We will assemble and test equipment, then learn and practice scuba skills. Patience is key as we help you down the path to scuba proficiency.
Duration: 2 to 4 hours depending on class size & comfort level.”

Wait a minute, this dive center is actually advertising that A. most of their students do one pool session and that B. it can take as little as 2 hours to complete. So today my friends I am going to take you through how this is a standards violation even for an agency that is modular or performance based training because there is no way that mastery of 80 plus skills can take place in two hours! So today I’m going to prove this to you by defining skill mastery in our industry. What it means and how to apply it. And then show how it is physically impossible to have students master all the skills for open water diver in 2 hours. Heck I would argue it might not even happen in four hours.

Okay, take a few breaths Tec.

Before we get to this content, I want to remind you about DEMAs Educational Series. The DEMA Show has launched its ten week educational series through Nov 20th. Greg Holt from ScubaRadio and I are cohosting this weekly event. Each week there will be professional business speakers and consultants talking about a variety of important dive business topics for you to excel in your dive business.

They are on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 10:00am Pacific time (1pm Eastern). If you can’t catch it live, that’s okay they are recorded. This leads up to the DEMA Virtual Show in November 17-20. This week on Tues 6th we had What’s Next for Your Dive Business: How to Plan, Prepare and Forecast for 2021 with Lynn Switanowski. And today Wed 7th The Collaboration Economies of the Diving Industry with Ed Rigsbee.

To get these educational sessions just go to demashow.com to register.

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Alright pro’s I better get some herbal tea and do some yoga breathing here, because it’s time to talk about the most abused concept in our industry – the definition of skill mastery.

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Okay, to recap, I consult with a guy who wants to be a pro and he’s taking classes at a dive center that promotes on their web page most students do one pool session and that pool session is 2 to 4 hours depending on class size.

Now before we tackle this subject I want you to know that I wrestled with actually mentioning the dive center’s name and agency. In one sense I wanted to expose them, yet in another sense what if they don’t know what they don’t know. In other words, their trainers did the same thing – or they copied what others are saying on other’s web sites. So I’ll refrain from calling them out. But I did bring attention of this to the training agency’s risk management department so that they may handle it as they deem necessary.

Also, you have heard me downplay three day open water diver courses – I consider them abbreviated training. But even when I worked at Pro Dive a large and legendary dive school in south Florida our one weekend class had eight hours of pool training – four hours on Saturday and four hours on Sunday. But what we are seeing is a trend to minimize the pool session contact hours. In fact, I told one of my staff about this episode and she said that a recent job she had at a dive center they told her she had to do all confined water in a two hour window. What? I went on that dive centers page, and it says how great they are and it all sounds good but they don’t post the time frame. Only the staff knows they are under a mandate to get everything done in two hours.

So in an abundance of caution I’m producing this episode because this may be occurring far more than even the training agencies know. And if that is the case, I hope this one episode brings about reform in our industry. Now listen, I want to be perfectly clear, I’m not championing an hourly requirement is the answer, and Im not saying instructors have to teach at a level that I teach at a university – No! What I will champion here is the absolute need to understand and apply skill mastery in all courses – but especially in the Open Water Diver course.

Time Issues

First I want to discuss time. Now we can do an entire episode on modular training versus time based training and the pro’s and con’s of each. But that’s not what I want to illustrate here. I want to point out literally what 2 hours of confined water training looks like in an Open Water Diver course.

Although I’m a multi agency instructor Im going to use the PADI Confined Water standards since the majority of listeners are PADI pro’s. You can apply this to your agency too, as the required skills for Open Water Diver are not that far off from each other. So check this out, PADI requires 5 confined water sessions. Now each of these sessions must be distinct, that means you can’t just stay in the water and roll into the next session. No, you must perform an assembly of gear, an entry, an exit and disassembly of gear for that confined water session to be complete. So right off the bat, if that’s not happening – EEEE – violation of standards.

Next, let’s take that two hour pool session and divide it by the five required confined water sessions. 120 minutes divided by 5 and that gives you 24 minutes per session. That’s worthy of repeating – 24 minutes per confined water session. Now let’s look at the required skills involved. Confined water session #1 – 22 skills, CW 2 – 21 skills, CW 3 -15, CW 4 – 16 skills and CW 5 – 14 skills (on the slates it looks like 7 skill but the mini dive actually has multiple skills within it) so it is 14 required skills. That’s a total of 88 skills to be taught in the Open Water Diver course.

Hmmm. So let’s look at confined water session #1 you have 24 minutes to complete 22 skills. Actually you have 24 minutes to MASTER 22 skills. Now most instructors will begin confined water #1 with the swim assessment which is included in the 22 skills of PADI’s confined water session one que cards. Now how long does it take to do a 200 yard/meter swim for the average student? Let’s average that out to be 10 minutes of non stop swimming, now you give them a few minutes to catch their breath and then do the 10 minutes tread water float exercise. You are already up to 22, 23, 24 minutes and all you have done is the swimming assessment! You haven’t even shown them how to set up their gear yet! So now let’s recalibrate, you now have 86 skills to complete in the remaining 96 minutes.

Folks, unless you’re Dr. Strange and can warp time, it is physically impossible to state the need to know, state the objectives, demonstrate the skill, then have one student perform the skill , then debrief the skill in one minute and 12 seconds per skill. Im going to say one student for those who say oh i can do two hours if its a private class – no you can’t! Do you see how this can’t be done? And as many of you know, some of those performance requirements have the student perform the skill for 30 or 60 seconds – such as no mask swims, alternate air breathing, neutral buoyancy, etc. This simply can’t be done physically. And guess what we haven’t even talked about mastery of these skills.

Skill Mastery

I reached out to several of our training agencies for their definitions of skill Mastery, and did not hear back from many of them at the time of this recording. Im sure that it is not because its not defined, I just probably didn’t give them enough heads up before recording this episode. So let’s see how agencies are defining Mastery.

Here’s what PADI states in its standards and procedures, “Mastery Learning. PADI courses/programs are performance based. Certification signifies that the student demonstrated mastery of all course knowledge and skill performance requirements. During confined and open water dives, mastery is defined as performing the skill so it meets the stated performance requirements in a reasonably comfortable, fluid, repeatable manner as would be expected of a diver at that certification level.”

I like the wording here reasonably comfortable – actually I wish they would just say comfortable – because “reasonably comfortable” is completely subjective and wrought with flaws of interpretation. This does not mean heavy breathing and shaking hands. Fluid, that means there’s no pause, there’s no hesitation. And repeatable, this can be done the same way, without fault, over and over again.

Here’s what SSI states, “SSI Training Centers and SSI Professionals must ensure that each student receives the required knowledge, skills and experience to comfortably and confidently dive at the specified level of training before conducting open water training dives.
It is the SSI Professional’s duty to ensure that all students achieve mastery of all required skills before issuing a certification. To achieve mastery the student must be able to comfortably repeat the skill in diverse and adverse conditions.”

This wording of diverse and adverse conditions is important here. Let’s go back to my list of 88 skills from PADI’s confined water and let’s look at one of the harder skills to master, the mask clear. There are 5 skills related to mask clearing. These are partial clear, full mask clear, mask removal and replacement, no mask breathing and underwater swimming with no mask.

And you could add a sixth if you do a mask problem solving in the mini dive. But what if the student does the same method of clearing each time – using two hands. How about teaching one hand clearing? How about teaching side clearing? So this helps when being able to repeat in diverse conditions.

Regulator recovery, the standard says to teach it one time. But is it reach or sweep? If you only teach the sweep method, then what happens when their body position changes underwater – neutral in trim, verses ascending on a descent line to a safety stop. The exercise is very different upright versus neutral. Point is practice more for the variety of conditions.

Repetition

Now about repetition, at the beginning of each pool session I do a review of what was learned from the previous session – and I mean the core stuff. So we cover two regulator clears, two regulator recoveries, mask clearing, alternate air sharing, neutral buoyancy – all before we learn new stuff. This alone creates outstanding comfort. Listen to what SSI states about repetition:

“Comfort through Repetition is another core tenant of the SSI Teaching Philosophy. We believe that simply showing the ability to complete a skill or task isn’t enough to create a capable diver. A student may demonstrate a skill correctly on their first attempt, but true mastery (which increases the student’s comfort and confidence) comes from learning the component steps of the skill, then developing comfort and muscle memory by repeating the skill and gradually introducing more complex tasks over time.

This philosophy requires instructors to make the most of the time they spend with their students in the water. Your students need as much time as it takes to develop the muscle memory that comes with learning a new skill, which often can’t be done in a weekend. The SSI Education System encourages you to conduct more training dives whenever possible to ensure your students are completely prepared for the next phase in their training.”

Folks SSI is a modular performance based training program but they are explaining it really well! You simply cannot read and do skills on cue cards and when the student has done them one time you move on to the next skill. One time is NOT mastery!! Tell me anything worthwhile that you mastered by doing one time? How about shooting a basketball? Hitting a golf ball, baseball? What about your first time pressing on a CPR manikin? Did you nail it? How about cooking? How about driving a car? Do you see where I’m going here? Mastery does not occur when a student gets the skill right one time. I repeat, Mastery does not occur when a student gets the skill right one time.

So now what. All that we have discussed here should make each of us evaluate how much time we are allowing for skill mastery to take place – again for any course but especially Open Water Diver. We’ve proven here that it’s impossible to do properly in 2 hours of confined water training. But what about in 4 hours or in 6 hours? This is a valuable exercise to consider. And by all means, if your competition down the street is teaching 2 hours for five confined water sessions, or if they’re not getting out of the water and disassembling equipment in between pool sessions, that’s a standards violation. You need to report that if you see it, and if it is a customer telling you that, then encourage them to report it to the agency. Look it is up to us dive pro’s to keep this industry healthy.

Back in the day, it was mandated that open water diver took around 32 hours to complete. 12 hours class, twelve hours pool and about 8 hours of open water. If you were to tell folks back in the 70s and 80s that a 12 hour classroom session would reduce down to about 6 to 8 hours because of amazing technology of eLearning in 2020 aiding in that, people would grumble but probably understand the benefits. However, if you were to say 12 hours of pool time is getting reduced to 2 hours – 1/6th of the training time in the pool – boy there would be pitchforks and torches in protest. The required skills to dive have not changed enough over the years to justify a reduction of pool time by 84%. It just shows some instructors are completely ignoring what skill mastery is or they never learned it to begin with. And then there’s others that are simply lazy and cut corners. Either way, as dive pro’s we owe it to our students and our industry, to ensure the integrity of skill mastery, in all our classes.

Well so much for my yoga breathing and herbal tea.

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Thanks For Listening!

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