Articles on Motorcycle Rider Education: Part IX – Human Behavior

Forming Good Habits

When learning new skills, especially during the beginning of rider development, it is essential to form the correct habits so that future performance continues after completing a course. A coach is responsible for insisting on the proper procedures and techniques to develop excellent habit patterns from the moment training begins. 

A great example is “ATGATT” on the motorcycle, “All The Gear All The Time,” which can develop a habit that will reduce injury and save lives. However, as most coaches know, it is much easier to foster proper habits from the beginning of training than to correct already-formed bad habits.

This is one of the main reasons for using the building block techniques for instruction, as discussed in Articles V and VIII, where each simple task is performed correctly before the next learning task is introduced. However, introducing more advanced and complex operations before the initial instruction has been mastered leads to developing poor habit patterns in all elements, which are carried over into future performance. This weakness in growth can partly be attributed directly to the coach’s inability to correct the initial deficiency promptly, leading to poor performance during the final assessment of skills.

Human Behavior

To define learning is to discuss a modification of behavior resulting from experience. For a coach to bring about this type of change, the coach must know why humans act the way they do. Discovering the student’s basic needs and defense mechanisms aids the instructor in organizing the activities associated with promoting a climate conducive to learning.

Management of Behavior

The relationship between a coach and a student can profoundly affect learning. To students, an instructor by title symbolizes authority, so the preferred term “coach” is often used in these articles. It can lessen the hierarchical nature of the relationship in a sense, making it closer to peer learning versus a typical pedagogy-related lecture classroom. Students expect coaches to exercise a certain amount of management in the learning environment. They will relinquish authority to the coach, who willingly shares meaningful information from which students gain knowledge. The coach’s challenge is knowing what management techniques work best for which audience of students.

A coach should create an environment for the students to help themselves and others learn. Students who attend a class have goals that can be as simple as learning to ride, increasing knowledge, or meeting a regulatory obligation. The coach’s job is to guide the students toward that goal by managing the students, the curriculum goals, and the environmental safety to ensure success for all. If the process includes working to ensure the students meet objectives and modify student behavior, then success will be the outcome. This includes non-participation by the coach when necessary and active coach intervention when a student’s actions become passive or resistant to learning. A quality coach will exercise discretion regarding how much input is needed, how much trial and error is appropriate (some), and when to step in before bad habits are formed. Understanding at all times, the students must experience riding activity to develop their conclusions for behavioral learning to take hold.

Some interesting thoughts from McGregor (1960) include:

1)     The expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as play and rest. Therefore, the average human being does not inherently dislike work. On the contrary, work may be a source of satisfaction depending on conditions; if so, it will be performed voluntarily. On the other hand, when work is a form of punishment, it may be avoided, if possible.

2)     A human being will exercise self-direction and self-control in pursuing goals to which they committed. Commitment to goals relates directly to the reward associated with their achievement, the most significant of which is probably ego satisfaction.

3)     The average human being learns, under proper conditions, to accept and seek responsibility. Shirking responsibility and lack of ambition are not inherent in human nature. They are usually the consequence of experience.

4)     The capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity in the solution of common problems is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population.
5)     Under the conditions of modern life, the intellectual potentialities of the average human being are only partially used.

If you are a coach who accepts the five previous assumptions by McGregor (1960), you may begin to see the untapped potential available in a riding student. The coach’s job is to use ingenuity to discover that potential and allow it to blossom in an environment while allowing their behaviors to improve. If a student displays inappropriate behavior, these assumptions will relate directly back to the coach’s manner of management.

How to manage students through a healthy, solid, and productive relationship depends, of course, on the coach’s knowledge of human beings and the needs, derives, and desires they continually try to satisfy in one way or another. To that end, the following article will discuss human needs.

Until next time, Ride and Coach Safe!

Reference:
McGregor, D. M. (1960). The human side of enterprise. New York: McGraw Hill

Originally Published March 2o, 2017 on LinkedIn

© 2017, Donald L. Green, Rider Choices