SH252: Top Tips for Diving Instructors: Situation Awareness

Counter-Errorism in Diving: Applying Human Factors to Diving · Feb 11, 2026 · 5m

This episode looks at a common teaching challenge: when a student can complete the required skills but still isn’t ready to be certified. Through a personal story, the author explains how the missing piece was situation awareness — the ability to notice what’s happening, understand what it means, and think ahead. The student was using so much mental effort just to manage basic skills like buoyancy and trim that there was no capacity left to track their buddy, navigation, or decompression. The key lesson is that learning and performance are limited by mental capacity, and when students are…