Quote Originally Posted by Rutty View Post

It should not be beyond the wit of man to produce a common prone rifle instructor course. The idea of running it on the smallbore rifle might bring a few howls of protest, but I have yet to hear any substantive reason why that could not be done. After all, in order to instruct, the candidate would still have to hold the relevant RCO qualification and that would stop a smallbore only shooter instructing fullbore without any other experience.

Rutty
Rutty as this thread has come back to life so to speak, I would just like to say that as far as the NRA Club Instructor course is concerend you do not have to have the RCO qualification to do it. IIRC out of the half Dozen or so candidates that were on my course last year I think that I was the only one with the RCO qualification, I actually have both the NRA & NSRA RCO qualifications, although both orgainisations recongnise the other when it comes to shooting smallbore.
As far as the NRA Club Instructor (TR) course is concerend, they actually spent quite a lot of time teaching things that actually should be being taught on if not the Probationers course at least the TR improvers course that they run.
If you look at the NRA Clendar on line you will see that the Club Instructor course and the Improvers courses are run on the same weekend. On the second day the trainee instructors basically spend the day teaching the improvers course, so you actually get one day in the classroom and the next you are doing it for real, with real students. As most of the shooters that were on my course were not TR shooters but Classic SR shooters that wasn't very good for those that had paid £100 plus for the TR imrovers course, as many of those doing the instructing had really no idea about shooting propper TR, the disipline that they were "supposed" to be learining about. It seemed that most of those that were on the course were there as the clubs they belong to needed to have some instructors so that they could run probationer courses to the standard required for the new competency standards that the Safe Shooter Scheme requires.
Am I glad I went on the course? Yes, it was quite interesting and I did learn a bit, well about shooting anyway. My problem was that having an Adult Education teaching qualification already, I did not learn that much that was new about teaching/coaching. Also as I already mentioned they seemed to spend more time teaching things that should already be part of the skill set of a competent TR shooter. For exampe we spent aout an hour on how to build a basic prone position for a beginner, and without the chance to try any sort of practicle. Then we seemed to spend about an hour and a half on how to fill in and keep a plot on a range card; a skill that any reasonably competent TR shooter should have already mastered. I was the only candidate that seemed to have any experiance with them, having used them consistanly since I took up fullbore TR shooting. I know that keeping a good windage plot is important in TR but IMO is one to be taught to novices, and of course on the Wind Coaching courses. Would have much prefered to have spent some of that time on setting up the position, which was really rushed.
One final thing that I have to say was that some of the shooters that we had to instruct from the TR Improvers course, seemed to have a very low standard of ablity. They were supposed to have mostly been shooters that had passed the NRA probationary course, and then spent some time shooting with a club. It surprised me that some of the shooters that we had to deal with had managed to pass the probationary couse, let alone had been shooting with a club for a while. Maybe I have been shooting for too long now, but I don't remember shooting with others that were ever that poor. It may also have someting to do with having learned to shoot with a very good coach in the ATC and then learnt about fullbore TR while shooting with the RAF TR Club, so maybe I never got to shoot with any complete novices in my early days.

Alan