Originally Posted by
Moylan
Why?
Certification as such is meaningless. Your training resume suggests that you have a pretty solid background and are more than knowledgeable enough to be able to teach the basics to beginners. The idea that you need a certificate that says so before you can do it....that's a mistake.
If you are actually saying that before you teach, you'd like to spend some time with a master teacher learning how to teach, then that's different and of course it's a wonderful idea, especially if you're not very comfortable or confident teaching people, or if you've never put together any kind of lesson plan, or whatever. But certification for certification's sake is, in my opinion, pointless.
IMHO, no. The NRA doesn't teach you how to teach, it walks you through reading their slides to your students, at least at the low levels. In their instructor classes, you don't read slides in front of real students, and you don't coach any real students on the line. Just fellow instructor students. I'm not sure how things work in their higher level classes like PPOTH.
One alternative to the NRA is Project Appleseed, which I'd like to plug for. Their instructor training program is like the NRA's in one sense, because they don't teach you to design a curriculum, they teach you to deliver theirs. But in other ways, it's radically different, because you're doing this live, running real firing lines, coaching real paying students, and giving real instruction. The program is best known for its traditional rifle marksmanship program, but they are rolling out a pistol program now, too (roughly similar to NRA Basic Pistol, but better, IMHO), so you can get both rifle and pistol certified, depending on how active Appleseed is in your neck of the woods. And it's dirt cheap. You must shoot at two Appleseed clinics as a paying customer, which is very cheap, and then after that the instructor training program is all free, since you're working for them as a volunteer.
I'm not saying you need these certifications (see above!) but I am saying that Appleseed presents an inexpensive way to get meaningful instructor certification if you want it, and simultaneously to get real experience teaching, all while doing some important volunteer work teaching people about our American heritage, and spending time at the range with some super high quality people.
(Hopefully it's obvious that nothing I've said above is meant in any way to suggest that I'm somehow arguing against taking an instructor class with someone like Tom Givens. If you have the opportunity, there are all kinds of reasons to pursue that. I'm just talking in a context where you're trying to think through alternatives since classes like Givens's are a long way away and might be very expensive for ammo and travel related reasons.)