Prerequisites
This lesson covers the instructional technique strand of the RYA Cruising Instructor course. Before starting you should:
- Have read the previous lesson on the instructor ladder and understand who may teach which course.
- Sail to a standard well above Yachtmaster Offshore, so that you can demonstrate any Competent Crew or Day Skipper skill cleanly while talking.
- Know the Competent Crew and Day Skipper practical syllabi (the RYA Yachtmaster Scheme Syllabus and Logbook, G158) well enough to list the topics from memory.
- Have thought honestly about how you yourself learned to sail: what helped, what did not, and which instructors you remember and why.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
- Explain how adults learn practical skills and why telling is not teaching.
- Use the EDICT structure (Explain, Demonstrate, Imitate, Correct, Train) to plan and deliver a skills session afloat.
- Give a briefing that is short, ordered and safe, and a debrief that changes behaviour.
- Position yourself and the students so that a demonstration can actually be seen.
- Give feedback that is specific, timely and balanced, and avoid the habits that make feedback useless.
- Plan a five-day Competent Crew or Day Skipper course so that skills build in the right order and the syllabus is covered.
- Manage safety with novices aboard: risk assessment, intervention thresholds and the drills that must be real.
- Recognise the common failings that Trainers see on instructor courses and avoid them.
How Adults Learn Practical Skills
Sailing is a motor skill learned by the hands and a judgement skill learned by the head. Neither is learned by listening. A student who has been told how to tie a bowline and watched it tied has not learned to tie a bowline; they have learned what a bowline looks like. The learning happens when they tie it badly, see why, and tie it again.
Three ideas underpin everything the instructor course teaches:
- People learn by doing, with feedback. Your job is to create safe opportunities to do, and then to give feedback that is accurate and usable.
- Attention is limited. A novice on a heeling foredeck has almost no spare attention. Long explanations are wasted; so is a demonstration of six things at once. One idea at a time.
- Confidence is part of competence. A frightened student learns nothing. The order of exercises, the weather you choose, the tone you use and the way you handle mistakes all decide whether students leave the week confident or put off for life.
Students also differ. Some want the theory first; some want to feel the tiller before they will listen to anything. Some learn by watching, some by copying, some by being talked through it. You will not have time to diagnose each student's style, so the safe approach is to give every topic in more than one form: a short explanation, a demonstration, and plenty of hands-on practice.
EDICT: The Shape of a Skills Session
The RYA instructor courses teach a simple structure for a skill session, usually remembered as EDICT (some trainers add an S for Summarise). The diagram below shows the cycle.
Explain
Say what the skill is, what it is for and when it is used. Keep it to a minute or two. Give the key points, not every variation you know. For a clove hitch: "It is for hanging fenders. Two turns, the second crosses the first and tucks under itself. It holds under a steady pull and can be adjusted. It can slip if the load works back and forth, so it is not a mooring knot."
Demonstrate
Show it, accurately, at normal speed, then again slowly, and from the angle the student will see when they do it themselves. A knot tied facing the students is a mirror image; turn so they see it the right way round. For a boat-handling skill, demonstrate the whole manoeuvre once without commentary so they see what it looks like, then once more talking through the decision points.
Imitate
Give every student a go, immediately. If there are five students and one tiller, think about how to keep the other four learning: one on the mainsheet calling trim, one on the bow calling distance, one watching the depth and the transit, one on the log noting what the helm did. Rotate quickly.
Correct
Watch, and intervene with the smallest correction that works. "Look at the mooring buoy, not the bow" fixes more approaches than a lecture on momentum. Correct one thing at a time; if a student is making three errors, pick the one that matters most, usually the one that affects safety or that the other errors stem from.
Train
Practise until it is reliable, then practise in harder conditions: more wind, more tide, at night, with a time limit. A skill that only works in flat calm is not a skill yet. Trainers call this consolidation, and it is the part most often cut short because the timetable is pressing.
Briefing
A briefing is what you say before an exercise. Trainers listen to candidate briefings very carefully because a poor briefing shows poor planning. A good briefing is:
- Short. Under two minutes for a single exercise. Students are standing in a cockpit, not sitting in a classroom.
- Ordered. The diagram below shows a structure that works for almost any exercise: what we are doing and why, where, who does what, the safety points, the signal to start and to stop, and a check for questions.
- Specific about safety. Which side the boom will cross, who is clipped on, where the danger zone is, the word that means "stop everything".
- Checked. Ask a student to repeat the plan back. If they cannot, the briefing was not clear.
A worked briefing for a first tacking session on day two of Competent Crew: "We are going to tack the boat, which means turning her bow through the wind so the sails fill on the other side. We'll do it six or eight times out here where there is room. Jo on the helm, Sam and Priya on the jib sheets: Sam releasing, Priya hauling in; Alex on the mainsheet, which you will not need to touch. The boom will come across the cockpit at head height; everyone keep heads below the boom and on the side I show you. Helm calls 'ready about', waits for 'ready' from the sheets, then 'lee-oh' as she turns. If I say 'hold' everyone freezes. Sam, tell me what happens when the helm says 'ready about'."
Demonstration and Positioning
Students must be able to see what you are showing them. This sounds obvious; on a yacht it is the most common thing instructors get wrong. The plan view below shows the positions for demonstrating a tack and for a winch demonstration.
Rules of thumb:
- Put the students on the side they will be working from, looking at the winch, cleat or tiller from the angle they will use.
- Demonstrate hand positions slowly. The dangerous moment at a winch is the fingers between rope and drum; show the flat-hand tailing position deliberately.
- If you cannot demonstrate without someone on the helm, give the helm to a student with a very simple instruction ("keep the bow on that church") and demonstrate from the cockpit.
- Never demonstrate from a position that you would not allow a student to occupy. If you lean out over the pushpit without a harness to show a trailing-log check, you have taught them to do the same.
Feedback and Debriefing
Feedback is where learning happens, and where most new instructors are weakest. The problems are easy to list:
- Too late. Feedback given at the end of the day about a berth attempted at 10 a.m. is almost worthless. Give it within minutes, while the student can still feel what they did.
- Too general. "That was fine" and "that needs work" teach nothing. "You put the helm over before the stern had cleared the pontoon, so the quarter swung in" teaches something.
- Too much. A list of eight faults is not heard. Choose the one or two that matter.
- Only negative, or only positive. Students need to know what to keep doing as well as what to change. The traditional sandwich (good, improve, good) works if the middle layer is specific; it fails when the positive comments are padding and everyone knows it.
The diagram below contrasts vague feedback with specific, usable feedback on the same manoeuvre.
A good debrief after a manoeuvre is a conversation, not a verdict. Start by asking the student what they thought happened. Most students know exactly what went wrong and need only confirmation and a fix; a student who thinks a poor approach went well needs a different conversation. Then agree one thing to change and go and do it again. End-of-day debriefs cover the day's progress against the syllabus and what tomorrow brings, and are the time to deal with any crew friction before it festers.
Planning a Course Week
A Competent Crew or Day Skipper course is five days. The syllabus is in G158; your job is to sequence it so that each skill is in place before the next needs it, the weather is used rather than fought, and there is time at the end to consolidate rather than cram. The diagram below shows a typical Day Skipper week.
Principles for the plan:
- Safety first, literally. Lifejackets, harness points, gas, heads, fire, man overboard theory and the location of everything come before the boat leaves the berth.
- Ropework and deck work before sailing. Students who cannot cleat a line or wind a winch cannot sail safely.
- Boat handling under power before sailing. Berthing under power on day one with the instructor's hand close to the throttle gives students an early win and gets the boat out of the marina.
- Each day builds on the last. Day Skipper: pilotage in, pilotage out, then a short passage, then a longer passage with tides, then a night passage once the day skills are solid.
- Weather drives the order, not the calendar. If Wednesday blows Force 7, Wednesday is for engine checks, chartwork, a reefing session alongside and a pilotage plan for Thursday. Have an alternative plan for every day.
- Leave slack. A plan with every hour filled fails on day two.
Instructor-to-student ratios for the practical courses are set by the RYA and the centre; a typical cruising yacht course runs with up to five students. On a Day Skipper course, every student must have the chance to act as skipper for passages and manoeuvres, which takes most of the week; plan who skippers what on day one.
Safety Management With Novices Aboard
An instructor is responsible for everyone aboard and is, in law and in practice, the skipper. Points that Trainers look for:
- A written risk assessment for the centre's operations exists; you should know it and apply it. Dynamic risk assessment happens all day: wind against tide at the harbour mouth, a student who is clearly seasick, a halyard that has seen better days.
- Your intervention threshold. Decide in advance how close to the pontoon, the moored boat or the gybe you will let a student get before you take over, and take over cleanly with a clear word ("I have the helm"). Taking over too early stops learning; too late is dangerous. Let the student make the mistake when the consequence is a bump on a fender, not a stanchion through a hull.
- Drills must be real. A man overboard drill with a fender and a bucket is real enough to be taken seriously only if you make it so: no warning, timed, debriefed, repeated until the recovery is clean. Fire and abandon-ship drills are walked through, not just described.
- Watch the student who is quiet. Seasickness, cold, fear and fatigue make people silent. The loud student is rarely the problem.
- Keep the boat safe while teaching. A demonstration of reefing is not an excuse to sail into a shipping lane; someone keeps a lookout and that someone is you until a student has been told it is their job.
- Night and bad weather are taught, not avoided, but the instructor's margins widen: more reefs earlier, lifejackets and harnesses without exception, and no exercise that depends on everything going right.
Worked Example: A Day Skipper Pilotage Session
It is day three of a Day Skipper course. The plan is for Ravi, acting as skipper, to take the boat into a drying harbour on the afternoon flood. Here is how an instructor runs it using the structure above.
- Explain (morning, at the chart table). Pilotage is navigating by eye with a plan prepared in advance: clearing bearings, transits, buoys in order, heights of tide at the sill. Ten minutes, with the harbour chart in front of the group.
- Demonstrate. The instructor sketches a pilotage plan for the previous harbour the students have already visited, showing the format: a sketch, a list of marks with bearings and distances, the tidal height needed, the abort point.
- Imitate. Ravi prepares the plan for this afternoon's harbour, with the others preparing plans for alternative entrances. The instructor checks Ravi's plan before departure, asking questions rather than correcting: "What depth do you need at the sill, and when will you have it?"
- Correct. On the approach, the instructor stands behind Ravi, says nothing unless safety demands it, and lets the plan work. Ravi misses the second lateral because he is looking at the plotter; the instructor says "eyes out, where is your next mark?" and nothing else.
- Train. Alongside, the debrief begins with "how did that go?" Ravi says he was slow to find the second mark. They agree that tomorrow's harbour will be done with the plotter switched off. The other students, who were calling depths and bearings, are asked what they would have done differently.
Total teaching time: perhaps fifteen minutes of talking across a four-hour afternoon. That is the right proportion.
Common Mistakes
- Talking too much. The commonest fault by far. If you are speaking for more than two minutes, the students have stopped learning.
- Demonstrating everything you know. Three ways to tie a bowline on day one confuses; one way, repeated, works.
- Taking the helm back too soon. Every time you take over, the student learns that you do not trust them. Take over when safety demands it, say why afterwards, and give it back.
- Feedback at the end of the day only. It must be immediate and specific.
- Running the same week regardless of weather. Trainers want to see you adapt. A pilotage plan done at a chart table in a gale is good teaching; a passage in a gale with novices is not.
- Forgetting the quiet student. Rotate roles deliberately so that nobody spends the week on the mainsheet.
- Demonstrating unsafe practice. Students copy what you do, not what you say. No fingers in the bight, no stepping off a moving boat, no unclipped foredeck work at night.
- Treating the syllabus as a checklist to be read out. A box ticked is not a skill learned. The certificate says the student can do it, so make sure they can.
Summary
- Adults learn practical skills by doing with feedback; attention is limited and confidence matters.
- Plan every skills session with EDICT: Explain briefly, Demonstrate accurately from the student's angle, let every student Imitate, Correct one thing at a time, and Train until the skill survives harder conditions.
- Brief short, ordered and safety-specific, and check understanding by asking a student to repeat the plan.
- Position students so they can see; never demonstrate what you would not let them do.
- Feedback must be immediate, specific, limited to what matters, and include what to keep doing. Debrief by asking first.
- Plan the week so skills build in order, the weather is used, and there is slack; every Day Skipper student must skipper.
- You are the skipper. Know the risk assessment, set your intervention threshold, make drills real, and watch the quiet student.
Check Your Understanding
- What do the letters of EDICT stand for, and which stage is most often cut short?
Answer: Explain, Demonstrate, Imitate, Correct, Train. Train (consolidation in progressively harder conditions) is most often cut short because the timetable is tight.
- A student has just put the boat alongside well but with the bow line passed over the guardrail rather than through the fairlead. What is the right feedback and when?
Answer: Immediately, alongside, and specific: confirm that the approach and speed were good, then point out that the bow line over the rail will chafe and cannot be surged, and have them re-lead it through the fairlead now.
- Why should a knot be demonstrated with the instructor facing the same way as the students?
Answer: Because a knot tied facing them is a mirror image; the students see the working end go the wrong way and copy it incorrectly.
- List the elements of a good exercise briefing.
Answer: What we are doing and why; where; who does what; the specific safety points (boom, clipping on, danger zone, the stop word); the signals to start and stop; and a check for understanding by having a student repeat the plan.
- On day two the forecast is Force 7 for the day. What should the instructor do with the day?
Answer: Use the alternative plan: syllabus work that does not need sea room, such as engine checks, reefing practice alongside, chartwork and pilotage planning, safety equipment and drills, perhaps a short handling session in the harbour if it is sheltered. Not go to sea with novices.
- What is an intervention threshold, and what are the two ways of getting it wrong?
Answer: The point at which the instructor takes control from the student. Too early stops the student learning and signals distrust; too late is dangerous. Decide it in advance for each exercise and take over with a clear word.
- How do you keep four students learning while one is on the helm for a mooring pick-up?
Answer: Give each a role that contributes to the manoeuvre and the learning: calling distance from the bow, trimming or dropping sails, watching depth and transit, timing the approach and noting what the helm did for the debrief, then rotate.
- Why must every Day Skipper student act as skipper during the week?
Answer: Because the Day Skipper certificate states that the holder can skipper a yacht on short passages by day; the syllabus requires each student to plan and take charge of passages and manoeuvres, and only doing it demonstrates it.
- A student says nothing all afternoon. What might be happening and what should you do?
Answer: Seasickness, cold, fear, fatigue or feeling left out all make students quiet. Check on them privately, adjust their role or the exercise, and treat the silence as a signal rather than as contentment.
- Give one example of unsafe practice that an instructor must never demonstrate even to save time.
Answer: Any of: putting fingers inside a bight or between rope and winch drum; stepping off a moving boat onto the pontoon; working unclipped on the foredeck at night or in rough weather; leaning outboard without a harness. Students copy what they see.
Sources and Further Reading
- RYA Cruising and Yachtmaster Instructor: the course the instructional strand belongs to.
- First Class Sailing: Cruising Instructor course content: teaching and learning theory, structuring feedback, lesson planning, instructional techniques.
- EDICT coaching model: a clear summary of the Explain, Demonstrate, Imitate, Correct, Try-again structure used across RYA schemes.
- RYA National Sailing Scheme Instructor Handbook: the RYA's own text on briefing, demonstration and feedback.
- RYA Yachtmaster Scheme Syllabus and Logbook, G158: the Competent Crew and Day Skipper practical syllabi.