Would you trust an ATC training instructor?

The stuff that students are supposed to learn needs to be correct, I am sure everyone agrees on that. The content has to be current and facts have to be facts. This is pretty much the baseline, or the minimum requirement for any training organisation or an instructor for that matter. Make sure that whatever it is that you teach your students holds water. This is the logos part we discussed in the previous text about rhetoric, but now let’s bring the topic a bit further.

It is not just about what the instructor teaches their students, there is also a question about who that instructor is. Who would be suitable to deliver this (correct) information to the students? That person needs to carry ethical appeal and character, which is called ethos. For audience to accept the message, it is very significant that they trust the speaker and hold them credible. The instructor needs to be seen as intelligent, virtuous and full of goodwill to be believable.

Take a moment to think about this and how much does it matter WHO is delivering the instructing. Would you trust just anyone even if the content is spot on correct and current? You want to know that the person teaching knows what they are talking about. You want to know that the instructor is a good person, is someone you can trust and is experienced in their field. The instructor needs to be seen as the expert. In a niche industry of aviation, an expert is someone from your own “community”.

The way the industry thinks of instructors is that only a pilot can teach a pilot and only an ATCO can educate air traffic control students. No professor can ever tell a pilot or an ATCO how to teach their job. And the more years of experience the instructor has under their belt, the higher the expert status and bigger the ethos.

This sort of thinking is something the regulatory framework enforces and training organisations embrace. Who can be an ATC instructor? Answer can be found in the books as a list of qualification, and experience requirements.  Take a look at the instructor staff of almost any aviation institute, and you see a gallery of heads with grey hair or no hair.  I mean no disrespect to loads of experience, long careers and age that comes with them, but in the realms of ethos, it is still really about the audience’s perception.  The instructor needs to have enough of ethos to be believable, not necessary the maximum.

I once conducted a thought experience in a reputable ATC training academy when we discussed about what the theoretical training material should be like. My suggestion was that the material could be designed to be a comic book, where characters such as Mickey Mouse and Goofy would engage in adventures in the aviation. The storyline would have the comic cover the needed topic in a format that resonates with younger audiences. The important point is that the actual content Mickey and Goofy are discussing HAS to be correct – loaded with logos. I was laughed off the room. “Cartoon characters are not credible. How would someone believe Goofy in a professional matter?” That seemed to be a ridiculous idea because even though logos was there, ethos was missing.

Consider two audiences. One is a group of  young, aspiring ATCO students on initial rating training course and the other is a team of controllers who have worked for twenty plus years and now are doing some refresher training. An instructor needs to carry loads more ethos to be perceived as credible in the eyes of the second group, while the first audience settles for less. That is why I actually think that the comic book style content would work for certain training phases.

For the audience to buy the message we have concluded that the content needs to be correct and it must be delivered by a credible speaker. So who would be the ideal person then? It would be the person who wrote the book that you need to study isn’t it? Perhaps so. We’d know for sure that logos is achieved as we study from the source. We also would consider the instructor extremely ethosful and credible – after all it is the person who wrote the book. Can’t get any better than that, right? Now imagine the person(s) who wrote doc 4444 giving the lecture about doc 4444. Not a very lively image, is it? There has to be something more to complete the picture. The third appeal of rhetoric, according to Aristotle is pathos, which we shall cover in a later article.

Please leave your comments and likes below. We’d be very interested to hear your thought over this and of instructor’s character in general.