Our Progression School was created to make more, better coaching available to our jumpers. Since its launch, we’ve welcomed an array of new coaches across FS, FF and TR, and we plan to look in more detail at disciplines like CF and WS in the future.
The aim of this post is to describe the process of becoming a Progression School Coach and unlocking the benefits therein.
Step 1: Get your BS coach rating (and keep it up to date)
The first step to becoming a Progression School Coach is to have a British Skydiving coach rating. The Progression School is intended to be the next level up from the BS ratings so you do need this foundation in place first for us to be able to build on it.
If you’ve already got a coach rating in your chosen discipline, then you’ll need to make sure it’s up to date, bearing in mind that it needs to be renewed annually.
If you don’t have your coach rating yet, we can help! Attending Coach The Coaches will give you the foundation knowledge and skills to make you a great coach, and then getting your lesson plans together, practicing delivering them and doing some jumps with our Progression School Trainers will get you to your goal of that initial BS rating.
Step 2: Increase your experience and currency
The Progression School celebrates experience and currency so it’s a very good idea to make sure you’re feeling nice and current before you seek your Progression School evaluation.
You can build your experience at Langar by getting involved in things like our monthly Progression Weekend, or coaching whenever people are looking for it. If you’ve yet to achieve your Progression School Coach status, you’ll need CI’s approval to do this but if you let us know it’s to build your experience ahead of your evaluation, it should be fine. Do ask if you have any queries about this.
This is true for both experienced and brand new coaches. Getting experience with a range of students, and coming to us for an evaluation when you’re feeling current, will set you up for success.
Step 3: Progression School Evaluations
The Progression School evaluations are intended to give us the opportunity to evaluate the quality of coaching at Langar, and you as coaches the opportunity to ensure your coaching techniques and practices are up to date and to get any tips and advice to continually improve.
The evaluation criteria are very transparent and laid out in the Coaches’ Handbook.
In short, we split the evaluation into two main categories:
1. Content
This is making sure the content you’re covering in your briefs is the content that needs to be delivered for that skill or jump. To help with this, we have lesson frameworks which are bullet points of information that allow us to check you’re covering the main points, without dictating the specifics of what you include.
Note: the FS frameworks can be found here, FF and TR are work in progress and coming very soon.
2. Delivery
The way we want our coaches to deliver content mirrors the standards set for British Skydiving instructors. Specifically, we’re looking for you to use the Methods of Instruction to enhance your briefs, as well as the instructional tools of whole-part-whole, EDIP and questioning – all described in more detail later in this post.
The evaluations consider both the content and the delivery, and you score out of 4 for each of those. Again, the criteria are clearly laid out in the Coaches’ Manual and our intention is for everything to be very transparent so you can easily see what success looks like.
You’ll be evaluated on the following, dependent on your discipline:
FS Evaluations
An FS coach will be evaluated on:
- One skill, e.g. side slides or turns (lesson frameworks here)
- The brief
- A video of the jump (should be of a real student) so we can look at your flying skills (can be from your perspective or outside camera)
- The debrief of the jump (should use the video above but can be delivered to a dummy student)
- The post FS1 qualifying brief
Our current FS evaluators are Laura Hampton, Pete Harries, Kayleigh Garbett, Matt Cumming and Jodie-Leigh Foster.
FF Evaluations
An FF coach will be evaluated on:
- The first jump brief, including pre-jump kit and logbook checks
- One skill, e.g. back to sit transitions (lesson frameworks here), including:
- The brief
- A video of the jump (should be of a real student) so we can look at your flying skills (can be from your perspective or outside camera)
- The debrief of the jump (should use the video above but can be delivered to a dummy student)
Our current FF evaluators are Chris Cook and Ally Milne.
TR Evaluations
A TR coach will be evaluated on:
- One body position brief
- One navigation brief
- One jump video so we can look at your flying skills (can be from your perspective or outside camera)
- One debrief of a jump video (should use the video above but can be delivered to a dummy student)
Our current TR evaluator is Ally Milne.
How we evaluate ‘delivery’
The delivery side is evaluated based on your ability to successful use the methods of instruction and instructional tools to enhance your interactions with your students.
You can learn all about the Methods of Instruction here.
The instructional tools are described here:
Whole Part Whole
This is an instructional tool that will enhance your briefs by showing the whole thing, then breaking it down into its parts, then reiterating the whole thing again.
The theory is that, by showing the student the end goal ‘whole’ first, you set their expectation of what they need to achieve, then break it down into its parts to show specifically how to get to that point, then confirm the end goal again by showing the whole.
An example of this is teaching the ‘sit’ position. Show them the sit position in its entirety, then discuss the parts that go into that, such as the head position, the chest position, the angle of the legs, where the arms should be etc. Then show them the sit position again to confirm.
EDIP
Explain: Start by explaining the thing you want them to learn
Demonstrate: Demonstrate the thing you want them to learn – it’s important that your demonstrations are always the best they can be
Imitiate: Have the student imitate you doing the thing you want them to learn
Practice: Let them practice, while giving them coaching tips, until they’re confident and doing a good job
Questionning
This ties into ‘confirmation in stages’ as described in Methods of Instruction; you should be asking open questions of your students and, if in groups, use the ‘question, pause, nominate’ technique to ask, then wait, then nominate one person to answer. This encourages everyone to think of the answer and reflect on what they’ve learned, and for you to confirm that they’ve learned what you need them to.
When can I be evaluated?
Evaluations can be done any time our Progression School Trainers (PSTs) are available to do them.
As a minimum, we make ourselves available on Progression Weekends, which occur on the second weekend of every month.
We can do the evaluations during bad weather, using dummy students, or during good weather when you’re working with real students.
All results are kept on file and once successful, your name is added to the Progression School Coaches list to receive the benefits, which start with packing tickets for every coach jump.
If you have any questions, please contact Laura Hampton in the first instance.