Learn › Teaching › The Learning Process

The Learning Process

A learner practices whatever they do, not whatever you meant. Everything in the learning process is about making sure those two are the same thing.

Fundamentals of Instructing — FI.I.B

Why an instructor starts here

Every hour you spend teaching leaves something behind, and it is not always what you intended. A learner who flies a whole lesson holding the nose up with muscle instead of trim has practiced that, and practiced it well. Unlearning it later is harder than learning it correctly the first time. That is why the learning process sits at the front of a flight instructor's syllabus: it decides what you correct on the spot, and whether the skill your learner shows you today survives three weeks of not flying.

What learning actually is

Learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior that comes from experience. Not from being told. Told is information; changed is learning, and the gap between them is where the instructional time goes.

Two explanations of that change matter to you. Behaviorism treats behavior as driven by what followed it last time, which is why praise placed right after the thing you want repeated does real work. Cognitive theory treats learning as change inside the learner's mind, built actively by the learner. You cannot pour it in. You arrange the experience and let them construct it.

Four things are true of it every time, and an examiner may well ask you to name them. Learning is purposeful — each learner sees the same lesson from their own viewpoint, and their past experience decides what they are ready for. It is a result of experience, which is the part instructors resent: you cannot do it for them, because a person can only learn from what happens to them. It is multifaceted — alongside the maneuver they are picking up attitudes, habits and an opinion of you, whether or not any of that appears in your lesson plan. And it is an active process: sitting through a briefing is not learning, and quoting the answer back verbatim is not proof of it either.

Perception comes before everything

Perceptions are the raw material of all learning — what the learner takes in through the senses, most of it through the eyes. Five things bend what each learner gets.

The physical organism comes first: someone airsick, cold or exhausted perceives badly and learns almost nothing. Then goals and values, which decide what looks worth noticing, and time and opportunity — a learner who has not yet perceived pitch and power separately cannot perceive their relationship. Self-concept, their private opinion of whether they are any good at this, filters everything. And the element of threat: fear narrows the perceptual field, so a frightened learner shrinks down to the threat and stops perceiving the lesson. Fear does not sharpen learning. It ends it.

Insight is separate perceptions grouping into a meaningful whole — the moment the yoke, the trim wheel, the airspeed and the sound stop being four things and become one idea, pitch control. Creating insight is a large part of the job, and it happens when you keep pointing out how each piece relates to the whole pattern.

How knowledge gets built

Knowledge arrives in three phases, and they are not the same thing as the levels you grade against. Memorization is the first attempt at a new topic: facts, numbers, the steps of a procedure. It has a real advantage — it gets a learner moving quickly — and a hard limit, which shows the moment you ask a question the memorized material does not cover. Understanding is the next phase, when those facts start noticing each other and organize into how a thing actually works. Concept learning is the third: the learner groups things that share important attributes and starts working with categories instead of instances, which is why a generalization is more powerful than a fact — it describes many things at once.

Take stalls. Memorization is the definition. Understanding is why the wing stops flying at a particular angle of attack. Concept learning is the point at which a stall stops being a maneuver done at altitude with the power at idle and becomes a category the learner can recognize a new member of — a steep turn, a base-to-final turn, a go-around flown badly.

The four levels of learning

For teaching and assessment the FAA uses four practical levels, and these are the words the knowledge test and the ACS use. Rote is the ability to repeat something you were taught without understanding it or being able to use it — the learner recites the five steps of a turn entry. Understanding puts concepts together, so they can explain why each step is there. Application is doing it: they have seen it demonstrated, have practiced it, and can produce it consistently. Correlation is associating what they have learned with other blocks of learning, whether previously taught or still ahead — turn entries connected to flying a traffic pattern, stall recognition connected to the base-to-final turn.

Correlation should be the objective of aviation instruction, and application is exactly where instructors are most tempted to stop. Teaching the turn to a consistent standard and then moving straight on to the next item in the syllabus is piecemeal instruction, and it is inefficient. It also decides how you ask questions: one that only tests rote tells you nothing about whether the top two levels are there, and the top two levels are the ones that keep people alive. Learning runs in three domains at once, too — cognitive knowledge, affective attitudes and psychomotor skill — and the affective domain, judgment and willingness to say no, is hardest to grade and matters most.

The six laws of learning

• Readiness — a learner who wants it learns; one who is distracted, worried or unwell does not, however good the lesson is.
• Effect — behavior with a satisfying outcome gets repeated. A lesson ending in embarrassment teaches avoidance.
• Exercise — what is repeated is remembered. Use it or lose it.
• Primacy — what is learned first is learned strongest, which is why the first demonstration has to be the correct one.
• Intensity — an actual crosswind teaches more than a description of one.
• Recency — the most recent thing is the most available, which is the argument for a real summary at the end of every lesson.

How a skill gets built

Physical skill goes through three stages. In the cognitive stage the learner knows intellectually what to do and is talking themselves through it. In the associative stage they do it with deliberate attention and catch their own errors. In the automatic response stage it happens without conscious attention, which finally frees capacity to fly the airplane and talk to ATC in the same minute. Plateaus usually mean consolidation rather than failure, and saying so protects motivation right where it tends to sag.

Knowledge of results moves people through those stages. Point out what went right and what went wrong promptly, because delayed feedback lets a mistake get rehearsed, and it is as useful for a learner to know when they are right as when they are wrong. Practice comes in kinds that are not interchangeable: deliberate practice aims at one specific goal and attaches specific feedback to it; blocked practice drills the same thing until the movement is automatic, and it does lift performance in the moment — the trap is that it flatters everyone in the room, because the gains show up in the lesson and not the next day; random practice mixes the skills up, feels worse while you are doing it, and is what survives to the checkride.

Scenarios, distractions and errors

Practicing a maneuver in isolation builds the maneuver. Practicing it inside a scenario builds the pilot. A good scenario states its objectives clearly, is tailored to that learner, and uses the local environment — the short runway, the awkward airspace transition, the ridge that always produces the same downdraft. Realistic distractions belong in it, because dividing attention is a skill of its own. Drop a pencil. Ask for a heading. Then watch the airplane.

Four things go wrong there, and they are worth naming separately. A distraction is an unexpected event that diverts attention momentarily, and the learner has to decide whether it deserves action. An interruption is a bigger problem — the learner voluntarily suspends one task in order to complete another, and interruptions are a significant source of errors: an ATC call arrives partway through the before-landing checklist, and the checklist never resumes where it stopped. Fixation is absorption in one task to the exclusion of the others, and it is often a sign that the task has not had enough practice in isolation to be affordable yet. Inattention is failing to attend to something important at all. The learner's eyes usually tell you which one you are watching before the airplane does. Break the chain early, because errors snowball, and afterward ask what happened rather than announcing it.

Errors split cleanly. A slip is an error of action: you planned the right thing and inadvertently did something else — a week of runway 30, then a clearance to runway 12, and the learner turns for 30 out of habit. A mistake is an error of planning: you did exactly what you intended and the intention was wrong. Slips yield to practice, checklists, routines and taking more time. Mistakes yield only to better knowledge and better judgment.

Which is why you critique early and grade later. Early on, a learner gains more from a practical suggestion than from a score, and early evaluation is really aimed at you: is any of this getting through, and are your techniques working? Later, when the standard is the point, grades are the right tool.

Memory, forgetting and transfer

Information passes through sensory memory, then short-term memory — about seven items, give or take a couple, held for roughly thirty seconds unless it is rehearsed or chunked into something larger — and only then into long-term memory. The coding takes several seconds of its own, so an interruption in the middle of it loses the item outright. Retrieval favors what is used frequently and what was used recently.

Much forgetting is not loss but retrieval failure: the item is in there and will not come. Things also fade from disuse, get interfered with by similar memories, and occasionally get suppressed because remembering them is uncomfortable — worth knowing after a bad lesson. What helps retention is unglamorous: praise, association with something the learner already owns, a favorable attitude, using more than one sense, meaningful repetition, and mnemonics.

Transfer is applying what was learned in one context to a new one. Positive transfer is the whole point of teaching fundamentals, and it comes from practicing under varied conditions, which is one more argument for scenarios. Negative transfer is the one to watch, and every learner brings an example to the airport on day one: years of steering a car with a wheel, applied to taxiing an airplane with the feet.

When learning stops

Motivation is probably the dominant force governing a learner's progress and their ability to understand. Keep it by rewarding success honestly and presenting new challenges before the old ones go stale. Positive motivation — the promise or achievement of a reward, personal, social or financial — does more for efficient learning than fear does. Drops are normal, they often arrive at a plateau, and the repair is usually to remind the learner what they are doing this for.

The other common cause of stalled learning is the instructor. Incomplete instruction produces apathy, and so do distracting mannerisms, untidiness and visible irritation with the learner. Talking down to someone is the fastest way to lose their confidence and their attention.

Where you meet it next

This is Task B of Fundamentals of Instructing in the Flight Instructor ACS, and an examiner will ask you to teach a piece of it — the laws of learning applied to a lesson you have flown, or how you would tell a slip from a mistake. It is also on the Fundamentals of Instructing knowledge test. 14 CFR 61.185, "Aeronautical knowledge," is the regulation underneath all of it: a flight instructor applicant must receive and log ground training from an authorized instructor on the fundamentals of instructing, with the learning process named first in that list, unless they fall under one of the exceptions in the same section — holders of a flight or ground instructor certificate, and certain teachers. Regulations change; the current CFR is the authority, not this page.

After that you use it every flight. The order you teach in is primacy. The debrief is recency and knowledge of results. And when your learner goes quiet and locks onto the airspeed indicator, you will recognize it early enough to act. The rest of the ground school library is raw material; this is how it gets into someone's head and stays there.