New CFI Looking for Advice About Lesson Progression

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Lucky_Income_4053@reddit

Congrats on starting up instructing! You will generally have an outline of what you want to accomplish for PPL and then you can extend / shorten sections based off how the students are doing. Once you train a few you'll find a flow that works for you. My outline looked something like:

Basic flight controls / turns / climbs descents (1-2 flights)

Maneuvers introduction (1-2 flights)

TOLs (6-8 flights)

Solo prep / emergency training (6-8 flights)

Solo TOLs (3-4 flights)

XC training (4-6 flights)

Solo XCs (4-6 flights)

Checkride prep (3-5 flights)

Some general tips I found that helped me:

Give your students time to figure things out in the air with you, don't just give them the answers every time especially if they're close to soloing or after. Prompting students with "anything we should be doing now?" and trying to push them to the edge of what they can handle pays dividends. If you do everything for them on the first 10-15 flights they'll get to solo prep and will have built 0 habits for getting WX / prepping for the airport / coms etc. they'll need for the rest of their piloting career. Demonstration / performance method is very helpful, show them all the steps to fly into a local airport for traffic patterns one day and then have them do it the next day and have them work through the steps with you. Law of primacy is very very important (obviously lol) and when you get your students task saturated (very easy to do) you'll see very clearly what they've retained vs not retained even just a few flights in. Don't let them rush and try to have them stay as far ahead of the plane as possible! You'll get a flow for it. BIGGEST thing (personal pet peeve of mine) is DO NOT kill your students confidence in their flying! There is a massive difference between educating / improving their flying and toasting their hopes / dreams because they did something stupid. Most PPL students have no frame of reference for flying other than YOU as their 1st instructor, and if you say they suck they will believe it and their flying will reflect it. We all know when we messed up, have them explain to you what they did wrong and how they will fix it, and in your debriefs make sure you build them back up after! Confidence as a student pilot is a fragile thing, they need you in their corner and need to be comfortable enough to fail in front of you and learn from it. How you say something can be just as important as what you say!

Good luck and enjoy it! It all comes together over time.

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BrianAnim@reddit

This is what I put together to help with tracking progress: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rXyvmC1FZFQbHXkRrqSbwNbUi8YIoJiQaiMKHREColc/edit?usp=sharing Feel free to clone it into your own google drive.

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williamgymnst@reddit

Check with the flight school to see if they have a preferred curriculum. Part 61 schools aren't required to have this, and it's one of the main differences between 61 and 141, but the more organized 61 schools will have some level of standardization that they want their CFIs to use.

If they don't, I started with curriculum plans that are available online. A Google search will return plans from Sporty's, King Schools, etc. Use these as a starting point. Sometimes they will have full lesson plans as well, but it sounds like you're looking more for an overall curriculum guide.

Remember how difficult it was to begin putting your CFI binder together? You just gotta get the ball rolling and ideas will start coming of how you want to put the binder together. Same thing. Use the curriculum plans online as a starting point, and tweak along the way once you've tried things with your first student.

Also remember that each student is different and will progress at different rates, but you will be able to assess when a student has a handle on climb, descents, and turns and is ready to trying climbing/descending turns. Just remember that your job is to be able to sense when they have a firm grip on a skill, but also need to be challenged with the next skill. It's a balance.

90% of the time, you just need to get a starting point and find tweaks along the way.

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Kermit-de-frog1@reddit

Example of ONE. Let me give you a student perspective, from a student that started later in life. Almost everyone thinks they want to learn to fly. You are going to hook us with that discovery flight IF you make it fun. You can’t control wind/atmo conditions, but you CAN control how you explain and reassure the student/prospective student. EXPLAIN turbulence, EXPLAIN that it is atmo input NOT student input. My CFI is awesome with this, however I also bought an Exp. Plane and went up with the previous owner for familiarization training. Former owner is a rotor head and multi ATP with 1000s of hours and just finished ( in the three days before) a 1100 mile ferry in the bird through some sketch weather. We went up in the afternoon and for a moment I thought I bought the wrong bird. I had the controls and MY perception was that I was making inputs that were increasingly destabilizing the aircraft, so I handed the controls back an observed . Did this a few times and when we got back on the ground for the debrief he asked why all the handoffs. ( should add that with each handoff I was watching his inputs and determined that it wasn’t my inputs, just the plane reacting to atmo), so I explained my perception. He paused, and apologized for not realizing that what was normal to him was unusual to me in that bird.

For reference, On my exp. Wing loading is about half of an aa-5 travelller or Cherokee 140, so if a bird farts in the air, you feel it in the wings.

We went back up and I had a ball! I now knew what I could expect in that bird, and had the guy telling me what was normal for conditions in that plane.

A good CFI will explain anything that might SEEM out of the ordinary until the student has enough in their mental toolbox to define normal operation.

To be clear, I had already tested knowledge test for sport and ppl ( via Sportys course) and passed in the 90s so I knew the theory before I ever sat in the plane . But I didn’t have any physical reference for normal for that bird.

Yes you have to add complexity, as training progresses, but crawl , walk , run progression with explanation will go a long way to retaining a student ( and getting paid by them ) .

Just my .02, and congrats on the CFI !

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SpiritFlight404@reddit

I’d recommend getting a new/used version of Jeppesen or sporty’s lesson plan.

Or the CFI notebook. They’ll have the standards for completion in each lesson and have building block model implemented into the lesson plan.

The first two lessons sound good. You got this!

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rFlyingTower@reddit

This is a copy of the original post body for posterity:

Hey everyone,

I’m a brand-new CFI about to start instructing at a Part 61 school, and I’m looking for some guidance from more experienced instructors on how to structure lessons for private pilot students. Specifically, I’d love to hear how you progress a student from day one.

For example, do you start with a walk-around and basic controls on the first lesson, then move on to turns, climbs, and descents in the next lesson? I am familiar with ground lesson progression, but teaching in the airplane is new to me. The FAR's are helpful, but I want to know what you have seen out in the "real world".

I know every student is different, but I want to make sure I’m building a solid foundation and helping them progress efficiently. Any tips, advice, or general thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

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