Definitely not! Personally knowing the cadets that ran this, I know they’re well versed in their knowledge of drum majoring having partially helped them learn as well as having benefitted from their knowledge myself, and having seen them run lessons f2f pre covid, but unable to sit in on the teams lessons, I have no doubt it was to a high quality knowing the standards they set themselves on a day to day cadet basis.
Training, at whatever level, whether that’s squadron, or putting together training packages at national level, should be done by those who not only know the subject, but can also make it entertaining and worthwhile for their cadets. When we look at what individual cadets enjoy, you’ll find that their favourite activities may not always be something they’re good at, but where whoever’s has been teaching or leading that activity has been engaging and knows what the cadets want from it. It’s why we struggle to find cadets wanting to do things like QAIC because they’ve never been engaged with classification training. At a squadron level, I took ideas from other staff members from camps and courses I had been on when we had discussed training and implemented these when I took over classification training, specifically first class, it got a lot more cadets engaged and talking about the subject as well as asking questions. It also helped them understand more.
I think what we need, especially when we get back to f2f, should be something along the lines of ideas for activities to go with lessons. Something with a couple of different ideas that can help instructors get cadets to interact, for teaching contour lines at first class, I have lots of bits of thick cardboard cut out and I get my cadets to build hills and mountains, then transfer what they’ve made in 3D to a map drawing with contours, and if we’ve gotten so far through the syllabus, naming the types of landforms that they’ve created too. Something like this cost absolutely nothing, we had loads of cardboard in stores already, and I’m sure lots of us have been getting deliveries, and it doesn’t hurt to save up the packaging.
Unless we start making things engaging and doing what we advertise, we’re going to lose cadets and staff and after covid, that’s going to be natural, so maybe now is a good time to overhaul our training methods specifically so when we inevitably have to recruit new cadets and start running the syllabus again, we can try new and different ways, see what works and what doesn’t. And maybe on the training portal there should be a way for lesson plans for different subjects to be uploaded outlining engaging delivery methods, where these can be uploaded with access by anyone to sharepoint so we can share methods and better our training ideas. I think this would be better than a fully national approach, as it’ll be coming from the people doing it at a squadron level, to help those at a squadron level which imho is more of what this organisation needs anyways.