SH252: Top Tips for Diving Instructors: Situation Awareness
Counter-Errorism in Diving: Applying Human Factors to Diving · Gareth Lock at The Human Diver
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Show Notes
This episode looks at a common teaching challenge: when a student can complete the required skills but still isn’t ready to be certified. Through a personal story, the author explains how the missing piece was situation awareness — the ability to notice what’s happening, understand what it means, and think ahead. The student was using so much mental effort just to manage basic skills like buoyancy and trim that there was no capacity left to track their buddy, navigation, or decompression. The key lesson is that learning and performance are limited by mental capacity, and when students are overloaded, awareness drops. Instructors can help by building basic skills slowly, watching for signs of overload, using debriefs to understand where attention was focused, sharing their own experiences, and remembering that instructors can lose awareness too. Developing situation awareness takes time, practice, and the right focus — and recognising this helps instructors support students more effectively.
Original blog: https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-instructors-situation-awareness
Tags: - english jenny lord situation awareness situational awareness