Educator, Not Instructor

Why the hard part of instructor standardization isn’t building it — it’s keeping it

Harrison Stanhope, Basair Aviation College, APATS 2026, ATO Stream

Somewhere in the middle of a talk about syllabus design and performance criteria, Harrison Stanhope drew attention to a word he had been using deliberately for fifteen minutes.

“You might notice that a lot of the language I’m using is educator, not instructor. An instructor is someone who trains a specific skill set. An educator is a more professional term. They train the student how to be professional, how to engage in systems, how to be safe.”

He offered it as his clearest example of why language matters in standardization. It also happens to summarize his argument.

Stanhope is Chief Operating Officer at Basair Aviation College in Australia, which takes students from no experience through to commercial pilot license, instrument rating, multi-engine endorsement, and instructor rating.

Instructor standardization — training and checking, in the language of his sector — is widely regarded as difficult to achieve, and Stanhope located the difficulty precisely. “Inherently, feedback is subjective, because it’s coming from someone’s perspective. And that subjectivity can be skewed and lead away from standardization.”

What can be standardized, and what must not be

The trap in standardization is overreach. Stanhope was explicit about where the line sits.

“We don’t want complete control over every word that comes out of the instructor’s mouth.”

What an organization can standardize is the content, the sequence, the agreed language, and the accepted standards. What it must preserve is the educator’s individual judgment, their ability to adapt, and their professional voice — all of which matter acutely in a safety-critical industry.

Get it wrong in the other direction and the cost lands on the student. Unmanaged variation, Stanhope argued, becomes a significant risk in flight training, and it attacks something ab initio training cannot afford to lose.

“We don’t typically see a lack of motivation at the early stages of flight training.” There are milestones a pilot remembers for life — first solo, first formal qualification, the commercial license itself. “If we don’t foster that properly through standardization, motivation can be really damaging towards a student’s progression.”

The commercial argument follows the human one. Accepted variance means competency takes longer to achieve, and in type-rated aircraft that delay is expensive. Pressure rises, risk rises, and safety events follow.

Four foundations

Stanhope laid out four elements an organization can build standardization from.

Regulatory alignment comes first, and starts with the regulator — or with the client. A training provider running type rating and line-oriented operations for multiple operators has to align with each of them to deliver training consistently.

Sequence and syllabus determines how that alignment is taught. Embedded instructional design defines how each skill should be taught and at what point it is introduced. And a shared professional language binds the rest together.

The scale of the regulatory layer alone is worth stating. Australia’s CASA Part 142 CPL syllabus carries seven exams and 150 hours of total experience, including 70 hours in command and ten hours in IMC. Underneath that sit 21 competencies, 79 elements, and 441 performance criteria — which every Australian training organization must meet.

But regulatory compliance produces a common goal, not a common method. Stanhope’s illustration is hard to argue with: give four different educators the task of teaching turning, and you may well get four different outcomes. “That’s not necessarily standardization. It might be training to a common goal.”

Course design is where deliberate progression gets protected — knowing what the student has achieved, what is coming, and preventing gaps. “We don’t want to leave these decisions up to the educator, because at the end of the course there’ll be competencies that are missed.”

His example is a good one. You would not open a course with engine failures, however pertinent: the student lacks the skills to succeed at it. Nor would you introduce an engine fire on startup in the first lesson or two. Sequencing is a design decision, not an instructor’s improvisation.

Flexibility still has to be engineered in, though, and Stanhope showed how it can be written into the syllabus rather than left to chance — a lesson plan carrying a conditional instruction to demonstrate a visual diversion if threats require it, then complete en route checks after regaining course. Some days are cloudless and it never arises. Other days bring rain, traffic, and terrain.

The filter

The section Stanhope flagged as trickiest was language — and specifically feedback.

He cited John Hattie’s Power of Feedback research, and the finding that most feedback is destructive: that it would frequently have been better to say nothing at all.

The mechanism he described is subtle. One educator simply gives the answer. Another asks questions. After a long, exhausting flight, a student may well just want the answer.

“But if those two educators are providing different levels of feedback using different language, they’re not engaging in the standard program. Now we’ve got one student who might be developing higher-order skills, and another who is being trained to be a first officer, not a captain.”

That is the cost of unstandardized language, stated about as sharply as it can be.

Stanhope’s remedy sits at organizational level: agree the terminology for instruction, and agree how feedback and assessment are measured. The purpose is to break down what he called the student’s filter — which “can be really thick,” because they are proud, because they have put in enormous effort, because aviation is personal, and because the cockpit is an intimate place to be assessed in.

The test he proposed is disarmingly practical. A student should be able to say: I know feedback is happening when I hear these terms.

Everyone’s job, and then the measurement

No organization can monitor every instructor. “You’d need twice the size of your crew room.”

Stanhope’s answer is to treat standardization the way the industry already treats safety. Everyone is responsible for their own professionalism. Everyone is responsible for safety and risk. “And just like that, everyone is responsible for maintaining standardization” — including calling out non-standard operations the way one would call out an unsafe practice.

Organizations support that by setting explicit expectations and by providing forums — meetings, case studies — where educators can align.

Measurement is where it becomes a system rather than an aspiration. Stanhope showed anonymized instructor-level data revealing, at a glance, which educators were significantly more likely to fail students, and course-level data showing which courses carried the highest failure rates. He noted a figure from the Heads of Training forum that only around 4% of big data is properly interpreted — a gap, he suggested, that standardization work could usefully close.

Culture completes the picture, and he framed it as a set of observable questions. What language is used in pre-flight and post-flight briefs? Is the feedback “congratulations, you landed the plane” — or “you landed the plane, however you were unstable on the approach“?

“It’s not necessarily about no harm, no foul. It’s about how they got there.”

His closing point inverts the way most organizations think about this work. Setting the foundations of standardization is the achievable part. Measuring competency, checking the checkers, deciding how often the checkers themselves are retrained — that is the real challenge.

“The bigger challenge is really maintaining and improving standardization, not setting the foundations for it.”

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