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Question: I’m a fairly new CFI about to teach a 10-week private pilot ground school for the second time. When I taught the first one, we lost half the class after the first test (three weeks in) because they didn’t think rote memorization was really learning. How can I keep this from happening again?
Answer: I write this from the perspective of someone who has taught more than 5,000 hours of Part 141 ground school. It is very easy for the learners to be overwhelmed when they begin ground school, and if they have not been a student recently or are successful in other aspects of life, they may be disappointed or frustrated because they are struggling.
To thwart this, I always warn the class to expect to feel overwhelmed at first because there is so much to know. Then I write the four levels of learning on the whiteboard and explain each of them to the class so that they know they will be passing through all of them—and know what to expect.
These levels are rote, understanding, application, and correlation:
• Rote is basic memorization but without understanding. It is the lowest level of learning, but you have to start somewhere. By the end of the second week of class, the learners should know the definition of “class” and “category” with respect to airmen and aircraft and be able to identify the cockpit instruments and the systems they are part of. You will be able to identify the five hazardous attitudes and their antidotes.
• Understanding begins about week three, as they learn how the aircraft systems operate, which instruments comprise them, and what the controls do and how the pilot uses them to their advantage.
• Application arrives about five weeks in as the class begins to apply its acquired knowledge to scenarios on the ground and in flight. For example, what should you do when flying a carburetor-equipped aircraft and you experience an uncommanded loss of engine power?
• By week seven, the learners will be able to show an understanding of correlation. For example, they will comprehend that an uncommanded loss of engine power and the engine roughness are likely caused by carburetor icing. They will know how it forms, when it may be encountered, and how to remove it by applying carburetor heat to melt the ice, allowing for the fuel-air mixture to reach the engine and the roughness to disappear.
These are ballpark benchmarks, but the point is it can happen by week 10, and they will likely be surprised at how much they have learned in such a short amount of time.
I have found it useful to do a quiz at the end of each chapter. It doesn’t have to be huge—usually no more than three to five questions, all gleaned from the FAA private pilot knowledge test. These tests aren’t graded. They are tools to demonstrate where the soft spots are in the learner’s knowledge. I advise the learners that these topics will show up again on the gradable class tests and the FAA knowledge test.
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