Choice & Consequences

If you teach Pull-Push steering then you do not coach nor do you have a client-centred approach. Before you jump up and down tearing your hair out in abject rage at the fact that I have dared to raise the steering debate, please let me take a moment to explain.

Coaching is about Choice, Consequences and Responsibility.

If you tell your pupils how to steer:

1.  You deny them the opportunity to make a Choice,
   
   
2. They are unable to experience and discuss the Consequences of their Choice,
   
   
3. They do not experience taking Responsibility for the driving task.
   
   

Practising making choices and decisions is really important and reduces the risk of being involved in a road crash. Making choices and experiencing the consequences of those choices is how we all survive as human beings. When we make a poor choice and experience negative consequences then we can choose to adapt our behaviour in order to experience positive consequences. This is all about us taking responsibility and is as critical to the whole of our lives as it is to driving.

The whole point of adopting a client-centred approach and coaching our driving customers is to improve road safety by preventing the appalling slaughter of young people (men, in particular) on our roads. In one of my earlier articles I spoke about crash helmets and the fact that if we all were forced to wear these as drivers then we would be much more likely to survive a serious crash. But coaching is about preventing the likelihood of a serious crash occurring in the first place rather than looking at minimising the tragedy of it once it has already occurred. It has to be more effective to coach people how to make choices, consider consequences and take responsibility for their actions and decisions, than to insist that everyone wears crash helmets.

Individual differences in human beings means that a ‘one size fits all’ approach will not work. One fifth of people experiencing this approach will be involved in a serious crash once they pass their driving test because they do not learn best in this way. This one fifth of people may well be the same people who struggle at school (or, indeed, excel) because they fall into the extremes and a ‘one size fits all’ approach is also being used in the classroom. People learn best when their learning preferences are taken into account and appropriate communication techniques are used to address these preferences. They also learn best when they are treated non-judgementally, neutrally and equally.

What they learn is that

1. Their thoughts and feelings influence their behaviour;
   
   
2. They have choices to make every time they are out driving;
   
   
3. There are consequences to the decisions they take;
   
   
4. They need to be aware of their strengths, limitations and development needs in order to remain safe as drivers;
   
   
5. Their emotional state will affect the way they drive;
   
   
6. They are statistically at greater risk of being involved in a crash because of their inexperience, age and gender (if male).
   
   

If instructors tell their customers what to do, rather than giving them the choice, they are only using one style of teaching and are not giving value for money or ensuring that learning takes place. They may be overlooking the 20% of learners, who are most at risk of being involved in a life-threatening collision when driving unsupervised. They are not addressing any of the above six points which relate to the higher levels of the Goals for Driver Education matrix.

On his lesson today I asked Ed what he would like to achieve. He said he hadn’t done any reversing yet and would quite like to have a go at the turn in the road. We drove to a suitable area and I said he could choose how he would like to do this based on how he felt he learned best. I offered him the following options:

Demonstration from me where I talked him through the main points of what I was doing;

Explanation with diagrams;

Have a go with my help;

Have a go without my help.

Ed said ‘I don’t mind. Whichever is easiest. What do you think?’ I replied that it was important that he should make the decision because he knew best how he learned and this would keep the responsibility for his learning sitting with him. He went for the first option and we swapped seats. I asked him why he thought a demonstration would suit his learning style best out of the options I suggested and he said that he could copy once he had watched and listened. Having demonstrated the turn in the road once, he asked me to show him a second time. Once we had swapped seats again, I asked him what support he would like from me as he practised.

This all worked really well and afterwards we discussed the importance of learning how to make choices, weigh up consequences and take responsibility for driving decisions. Ed could see that this process kept him in control of his learning and that this, in turn, would be invaluable to him once he had passed his driving test and was faced with hundreds of choices and decisions every time he was out on the roads.

Steering is just one example of how easy it can be to keep the responsibility for the learning process with the instructor and not with the learner, where it belongs. Coaching will reduce the number of casualties on the roads because it is a client-centred approach that focuses on Choice, Consequences and Responsibility.  Telling will maintain the status quo.