Tactical thinking -Teacher or instructor ?

In the tactical world, the word instructor is widely overused and has become an over-saturated description for many people. The meaning has become null in the sense that instructing and teaching are two very different approaches to the problem and the solution. For real world applications (high threat) instructing the solution isn’t enough as to teach the problem.

You are probably asking yourself already what is an instructor and where is the fine difference between instructor and teacher? Who should you strive to be?

In short answer.

An instructor will teach how to complete tasks.

A teacher will teach how tasks are created and solved.

So again, who should you strive to be? Technically none of the above, but we will get to this later.

The Instructor.

The common instructor will normally utilize one way of communication. He will typically begin with providing general information, afterwards he will give an opportunity to practice and eventually test the student.  A form of how “we do things here.” Simply put, an instructor is the one who instructs you how to accomplish certain “isolated” tasks, that are predefined and do not require a form or sort of analyzing. Instructing will often consist of creating repetitive patterns of solutions to repetitive problems, that require no understanding or analysis. An instruction is essentially unidirectional and provides no guarantee of learning what is ostensibly being “taught”.

A good example could be taken from the world of firearms. A typical instructor will teach that every time a weapon does not work, the individual should tap & rack, as this movement is designed as an unhesitating “Immediate Action” and involves no identification of the bolt for the cause. This reaction is most likely to be more compliant and efficient under fire, as misfire stoppages are more common (mistakenly viewed as user induced only).

It all changed when I got into long distance shooting later in the military, and mathematical problems became reality. It took me a lot of hiccups in the beginning, but ultimately I recognized, that my ability to perform beyond scripted problems was in fact fundamentally poor and that AGAIN I found ways around to solve problems intuitively. The reason for that, as at least I understood with the years, was that my time in math classes was not incorporating real teaching but a repetitive pattern of skills that prepared us students to pass a certain test and to meet certain standards. Meaning that if you understood the rules of the game and the drawings, you could score on the upcoming test, but not for performance on demand as you were not conditioned that way.

To conclude, the teacher will provide the student not only the appropriate solution to a given problem, but he will bring the student to a position of which he is able to understand the subject itself and to manipulate it deliberately to his own context or needed form of solution.  A good example could be the overused misunderstood term from CQB – the fatal funnel.

The fatal funnel traditionally describes a situation in room clearing, of which a cone-shaped path leading from the entry, where the assaulter is most vulnerable to defenders inside the room.With the years, as more and more people went through the modern military pipeline of instructing, the term fatal funnel became (culturally) a forbidden word that triggers immediately a negative subconscious response as the word is a taboo, a sin, a mistake that no one wants to be captured doing.