Types of Firearms Instructors

Facilitator of Institutionalized Doctrines

This category of instructor is discussing those who determine their qualification to instruct based off of their resume of field experience rather than their objective skill.  These individuals historically equate experience to skill, participation to proficiency, and as a result have little to no knowledge of the process of advancing one’s skill set. Due to this, they will often only be able to provide a student with vague, unhelpful phrases and sayings they are merely regurgitating from their past education.

These individuals are often times indoctrinated in their ways, considering themselves subject matter experts, and their ego bolsters the cognitive bias that prevents them from being receptive to new methods and ideas no matter how irrefutable the presentation.  They will likely have an anecdotal war story either from their own experience or that they’ve heard of that provides them with, in their mind, the justification to dismiss anything that challenges their beliefs.

These instructors are typically low performing individuals. They believe their resume is why students should listen to them and that they “have nothing to prove” to students. Often times they are focused on the outcome of any given “drill” and pay little attention to the process because, again, they themselves have never gone through the process of getting better so they do not know how to tell others to.  Their curriculum and class content is often simply administering drills without any real emphasis on what is occurring or taking place during the drill.

Teacher of Performance Based Principles and Concepts

This category of instructor is discussing those who determine their qualification to instruct based off of their ability to perform the actions they are asking and teaching others to do. They are often able to perform these skills to high levels as they have mastered it through a lifestyle of training and being a student themselves.

These individuals will have students focus on the process, with an emphasis on tangible, measurable outcomes based off of those processes. They are able to provide the students with physical demonstrations of what the curriculum should look like as they are capable of demonstrating it themselves, often with high levels of competency.  In addition to that, their level of skill and their journey as a student themselves has resulted in the ability to provide useful, individualized information as they are teaching the students rather than facilitating drills for the students.