Defence Instructor Mentoring Reflective Report

A lot of time during the PTI Class One Course is spent developing your ability to coach. I am going to reflect on a one week part of the course called Defence Instructor Mentoring & Evaluation (DIME). As an All Arms Physical Training Instructor I spent a lot of time delivering training to large groups. This meant that actual time coaching was limited. DIME was the first time I noticed this massive difference between instructing and coaching. We were being taught how to evaluate a lesson and then give the instructor feedback on their performance. In essence it was coaching an instructor. The emphasis in DIME was on how you give that feedback. This was alien to me beforehand. In the military I am used to people telling me that things are wrong. What I am not used to is being told why it was wrong or how something, if done slightly differently, could be improved. DIME taught me how, through Mehrabian’s communication model (1977), to build rapport with the person I am coaching. I could then use the knowledge of various coaching models (Whitmore, 2003) (Gilbert and Whittleworth, 2009) (Passmore, 2009) and goal setting technique’s (Rouillard, 2003) to formulate my feedback. A constructive feedback model can be found at Appendix 3.

The ability to guide a student to answer their own questions is a quality only good teachers possess. This is why I have chosen to reflect on a session of feedback that I gave during that