Task C of the CFI ACS covers three huge topics that entire college semesters are devoted to: course development, lesson plans, and classroom training techniques. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s valid — there’s a lot crammed into this single task. But here’s the important thing: this task is effectively required on every CFI checkride, even though the ACS only mandates Tasks E and F plus one other from Area of Operation 1.

Why? Because Area of Operation 4, Task A requires you to deliver a pre-flight maneuver lesson, and that task’s skill requirements overlap almost completely with Task C. Think of it as concentric circles — if you do Area of Operation 4, you’re doing Task C. So everything in this episode is material you will use on checkride day.

↓ Download EP3 ACS Companion PDF

K1A — The Teaching Process

Chapter 5 of the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook opens with an instructor named Bob preparing a classroom before students arrive — checking the computer, making sure the slides work, getting the lighting right. It seems obvious, but it illustrates the first of four steps in the teaching process: preparation.

The four steps are:

• Preparation — Show up early. Make sure everything is ready before your student arrives.
• Presentation — Deliver the lesson. Bob lectures the class on the topic.
• Application — Let the student do it. Bob breaks the class into groups to work a weight-and-balance problem, coaching them through the first one.
• Assessment — Evaluate the result. Bob has them do the next problem on their own, then grades it.

These four steps are an iterative process. You’re going to run through them over and over again throughout a student’s training. Think of it like a parent telling a kid to clean their room — it doesn’t happen after one conversation. You prepare, present, let them apply, assess the result, and then cycle back through. If your student nails steep turns one week and botches them the next, you don’t start from scratch, but you do cycle through a shorter version of all four steps again.

K1B — Essential Teaching Skills

Chapter 5 identifies four skills you need as an instructor:

People Skills

Be a good listener. Practice active listening. Interact with your audience. The worst thing you can do on a checkride is come in with a lesson plan and just read from it, or put up a PowerPoint and read the slides to the examiner. That’s not demonstrating people skills — it’s reading a teleprompter.

Subject Matter Expert (SME)

Being a subject matter expert with only 250–300 hours can feel like imposter syndrome. But think of a librarian — they haven’t read every book in the library, but they know exactly how to find the one you need. You don’t need everything memorized. You need to know where to find it and how to find it.

Assessment Skills

You have to let your students mess up. But there’s a fine line. Think of it as a circle of trust — early on, you keep tight tolerances. As you gain experience, that circle expands. You let them get closer to the stall, closer to the edge, because you have the confidence to recover. The failure mode on one side is never letting them below 1,000 feet on an approach (they never learn to land). The failure mode on the other side is letting them take an unstable approach so far that you can’t save it.

Management Skills

Planning, organizing, leading, and supervising. At minimum, you’re managing the timeline of yourself, your student, and the airplane. Is the plane airworthy? Are inspections current? What’s the weather? These are all management issues, and they’re the same skills that make airline captains effective. Most of an airline pilot’s job is management, not stick-and-rudder flying.

K2 — Course of Training

A course of training is defined as a complete series of studies leading to attainment of a specific goal. That’s it. It could be a private pilot certificate or a tailwheel endorsement — both are courses of training. Inside that course you’ll generally find a syllabus, lesson plans, and standard operating procedures.

K3A & K3B — Training Objectives and Completion Standards

Aviation training involves two types of objectives: performance-based and decision-based. Performance-based objectives are the hard numbers — plus or minus 100 feet, plus or minus 10 knots. They’re objective and measurable. Decision-based objectives are where risk management and scenario-based training come in. Did your student take the weather information and make a proper decision? Did they recognize the external pressures? Those are more subjective, and that’s where the PAVE checklist and ADM become critical.

K3C — Importance of the ACS in Aviation Training

The ACS contains all performance-based and decision-based criteria for each rating. As a CFI, you should be able to look at any ACS element and identify whether it’s performance-based or decision-based. A skill that says “maintain altitude plus or minus 200 feet” is performance-based. One that says “make a reasonable estimate” is decision-based — note the word reasonable, which is inherently subjective.

K4 — Organization of Material

How you construct and organize a lesson matters. Start with a good introduction — engage your audience, use those people skills. Then give an overview of the topic. When you get into the development, follow these principles:

• Past to present
• Simple to complex
• Known to unknown
• Most frequent to least used

These are building blocks. If you’re teaching navigation, start with the pencil, paper, and nav log before you introduce ForeFlight. If it’s a first lesson, you’re doing straight and level before steep turns. None of this is rocket science — it’s just organizing your material in a logical order.

K5A — Lecture

Lecture is a good way to introduce new subjects and summarize ideas. But lectures should be rehearsed. Practice teaching before you show up. Whether you use slides, a whiteboard, or just talk through the lesson, rehearse it. Ask your students for feedback after lessons — was anything distracting? Could you have done something better? Always strive to improve.

K5B — Discussion and Guided Discussion

Guided discussion works especially well for emergency procedure training. Think tabletop scenarios — you sit at a table with your student, give them an emergency, and logically walk through it to a safe conclusion. This is similar to Air Force pilot training “stand-ups,” where you stand at attention with nothing but your kneeboard and checklist and handle whatever scenario the lead instructor throws at you. It’s interactive, it reinforces learning objectives, and it’s far more engaging than reading from a book.

K5C — Cooperative / Group Learning

Group learning is great when you have it available. Students interact with each other, offer different perspectives, and work through problems together. In the typical one-on-one CFI scenario you may not use this much, but if you’re teaching ground school, break your students into smaller groups. Give them a problem and let them discuss it — it makes the lesson far more dynamic.

K5D — Demonstration and Performance

This is the method used most at the flight level. You demonstrate how to land, they practice landing. Chapter 5 breaks this method into five phases: explanation, demonstration, learner performance, instructor supervision, and evaluation. Notice the progression — you explain it, show it, let them try it, supervise them doing it, and finally evaluate them doing it without input from you.

K5E — Drill and Practice

Based on Thorndike’s law of exercise. Think sports drills in high school — line drills, shooting drills, tackling drills. In aviation, the classic example is emergency procedures. You want your student to automatically pitch for best glide on an uncommanded power loss with zero hesitation. That level of response comes from drill and practice, not from reading about it.

K6 — E-Learning

E-learning is everywhere. Almost all ground schools are online now. The problem Seth sees most often: instructors hit the “I believe” button once the student passes the written exam and never follow up. The student memorized enough to pass the test but never applied any of it in the airplane. Unsupervised e-learning leaves a massive gap at the correlation level.

Beyond ground school, e-learning includes aviation training devices. Know the hierarchy:

• BATDs (Basic Aviation Training Devices) — small fixed-base sims like a Redbird. Most common in Part 141 schools. Check the letter of authorization for what you can legally log.
• AATDs (Advanced Aviation Training Devices) — a step up, more capable, also common at flight schools.
• FTDs (Full Flight Training Devices) — the airline-level devices where you can earn an entire type rating. Hyper-realistic, but not something you’ll see at the GA flight school level.

Training devices are particularly useful for instrument flying, where you can drill six different approaches in an hour for a fraction of the cost. They’re less useful for VFR private pilot work where integrated instruction (inside and outside references) and the physical feel of the airplane matter more — a student who masters steep turns in a sim may develop bad habits like fixating on instruments.

K7 — Instructional Aids and Training Technologies

An instructional aid is any device that assists in the teaching-learning process — a model airplane, a whiteboard, a YouTube video, an interactive computer program, a simulator. The key point from Chapter 5: instructional aids are supplements, not substitutes. They reinforce what you’re teaching. They don’t teach by themselves.

Be targeted with your aids. If you’re talking about weather and you’re waving a model airplane around, you’re creating a distraction, not reinforcing the lesson. Match the aid to the specific point it supports.

K8 — Integrated Flight Instruction

Integrated (or composite) flight instruction means teaching your student to perform maneuvers using both outside visual references and flight instruments from the very beginning. Don’t condition your student to be hyper-focused on instruments. We fly through a sky shared with birds, other airplanes, and terrain. Controlled flight into terrain is a real threat, and a student who never looks outside is a student at risk.

K9 — Problem-Based Learning

Problem-based learning starts with a carefully constructed problem that has no single solution. The benefit is deeper understanding and better recall. Use real-world scenarios that require your student to make decisions — and consider pulling actual accident reports from the NTSB. The ACE Guide’s NTSB Safety Alerts feature links directly to the CAROL search page, so you can pull up the full investigation and use it as a teaching scenario: “What would you do in this case?”

K10A — Blocks of Learning

Chapter 7 of the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook covers planning instructional activity. Blocks of learning are the building-block units that make up a course of training — each block leads logically into the next, from simple to complex.

K10B — Training Syllabus

Your syllabus is the roadmap for the entire course. Chapter 7 provides examples of what good syllabi look like. Whether you build your own or buy one, know what’s in it and how to adapt it to individual students.

K10C — Lesson Plans

Chapter 7 lists characteristics of a well-planned lesson: unity, content, scope, practicality, and flexibility. Flexibility is critical. An overly complex three- or four-page lesson plan is rigid — it can’t flex to different learning styles or different levels of student knowledge.

R1 — Selection of Teaching Method

The ACS lists selection of teaching method as a risk management item. The best interpretation: if you jump straight to demonstration and performance without the underlying knowledge foundation, your student won’t be prepared to perform safely. Allowing an unprepared student to attempt a maneuver they don’t understand — especially one like landings — creates real risk. Select the right method for where your student is in the learning process.

S1 — Prepare an Instructional Lesson Plan

There are three skills listed, but S1 is really just an introduction to S1A and S1B. So in practice, you’re demonstrating two things:

S1A — Aeronautical Knowledge Ground Lesson

Teach the aeronautical knowledge that underpins a maneuver. If you’re going to teach steep turns, don’t just open the Airplane Flying Handbook to the steep turns page. Talk about lift vectors in turns, how bank angle increases load factor, how increased load factor raises stall speed, how exceeding maneuvering speed under load factor could damage the aircraft, and how an accelerated stall on the inside wing could lead to an incipient spin. Then get into how to do the maneuver.

S1B — Maneuver Introduction and Ground Lesson

Now walk through the maneuver itself — the entry, the execution, the common errors (the Airplane Flying Handbook lists 13 common errors for steep turns alone), and the completion standards from the ACS. Use visual aids: pull up the ACS and show the examiner the completion standards right there on the page. Take out a model airplane. Show a cockpit video. Draw an airfoil on a whiteboard.