The best instructors in the business say ‘I don’t know’ rather than try to BS* their way thru it.

One of the best pieces of teaching advice I ever got was “If you don’t know…say you don’t know.”

I was a young pilot instructor teaching in a major flight training center and pilots hate seeming to not know everything about their craft. Maybe we think that somehow makes us seem less a safe pilot, less the aviator extraordinaire than other pilots or why exactly. But, we do. And instructor pilots can really struggle with this – especially when we’re young and/or inexperienced. 

As such, accepting that it was OK for me the instructor to say “I dunno” in front of a room full of experienced pilot learners was a hard thing for a young instructor pilot like me to want to embrace. Especially when I would be doing so when standing in front of a room full of pilots who had 1) traveled great distances to come to training and 2) probably paid my company serious money for the privilege to do so.

But, that advice was invaluable. Because almost without fail, instructors of any subject – finance, music, science, auto mechanics or whatever - who are BS’ing some kind of flim-flam answer to a question to which they have no clue what the answer is, will – sooner or later - expose themselves as not knowing the answer. And once that happens, their credibility with that audience of learners is gone.

If you’ve ever had the painful experience of watching an instructor fail on-stage as they get caught in the act of trying to fake an answer to a class of learners, you know what I’m talking about. What did you think of that teacher/facilitator/instructor once you’d realized they were just “shining you on?”

The point here is, there’s no benefit to trying to BS your way past the question. The risk in trying it is huge - if you care about reaching your students and keeping them engaged for the rest of the training. But! Fear not! The benefits of admitting ignorance are equally big. That’s because someone who has the courage and self-confidence to admit when they don’t know something is instantly deemed as honest and believable – or credible.

Once I learned the smart play was to say "I don’t know" when I truly didn't and to immediately follow it up with, “But, I’ll research that question and get back to you,” life at the podium or the simulator's instructor station got a lot less stressful. And - best of all - the bonding with my learners and their engagement with the learning became that much more deep and impacting for all.

And style's what it's all about, right? It's an engaging, impacting, effective and credible style to just 'fess up to the class and say ya don't know. But, the other half of that credibility is immediately doing the research necessary to get the correct answer to those learners as soon as you possibly can.