Adaptive Techniques

Who Should Take This Course?

This course is for PADI professionals who want to become more thoughtful, flexible, and effective when working with divers with disabilities or other individual considerations that may affect how they learn or perform a skill.

To enroll, you must be at least 18 years old and hold a PADI Divemaster or PADI Master Freediver rating, or meet the applicable qualifying requirements.

You must also have completed EFR Primary and Secondary Care, or qualifying CPR and first-aid training, within the previous 24 months.

You do not need to specialize in adaptive diving for this course to be useful. If you teach or supervise enough divers, sooner or later you are going to meet someone for whom the usual explanation or technique is not the best answer.

The Standard Stays. The Teaching Can Change.

This is probably the most important idea in the course.

Adaptive teaching is not about lowering standards because a student has a disability. It is about recognizing that there may be more than one way for a student to successfully meet a performance requirement.

An instructor can get very comfortable demonstrating a skill one way and expecting everyone else to reproduce it. Most of the time, that works.

Until it does not.

A student may have limited mobility, strength, range of motion, hearing, vision, coordination, or another consideration that changes how a particular task makes sense. Sometimes the solution is a different body position. Sometimes it is modified equipment, a different entry, additional support, another form of communication, or simply breaking the skill into different pieces.

The job is to understand what the student needs to accomplish and then teach the person standing in front of you.

Start With What the Diver Can Do

It is very easy to look at a disability and immediately start making a list of limitations.

That is usually the wrong place to start.

Two people with the same diagnosis or disability can have completely different abilities, experience, comfort levels, equipment needs, and ways of solving a problem. An adaptation that is essential for one diver may be completely unnecessary for another.

Good adaptive instruction begins with communication, observation, and a willingness to stop assuming that you already know the answer.

What can this diver do? Where are they having difficulty? What is the actual objective of the skill? Is there another safe way to get there?

Those questions are useful well beyond adaptive diving. They are the kinds of questions good instructors should be asking all the time.

What Will You Learn?

The PADI Adaptive Techniques Specialty focuses on increasing awareness of varying abilities and developing practical teaching and supervisory techniques that can be used with divers and freedivers with disabilities.

During the course, we will explore things such as:

• Recognizing individual abilities and considerations before and during training.
• Communicating with students about what support or adaptations may actually be useful.
• Applying student-centered and prescriptive teaching techniques.
• Adapting common scuba or freediving skills while maintaining required performance standards.
• Exploring different approaches to entries, exits, equipment handling, positioning, and underwater skills.
• Using buddy or assistant support appropriately without unnecessarily taking control away from the student.
• Considering equipment changes or configurations that may make a skill more accessible.
• Motivating and encouraging students without making assumptions about their capabilities.
• Evaluating when standard PADI certification is appropriate and when another training path or specialized organization may better meet the diver’s needs.

This is not a collection of tricks for dealing with a particular disability. It is training in how to think more flexibly as a dive professional.

Sometimes the Problem Is Not the Skill

Adaptive thinking starts before anybody puts a regulator in their mouth.

A student may be perfectly capable underwater and still face challenges getting a cylinder across a parking lot, climbing a boat ladder, making a giant-stride entry, reaching a valve, carrying assembled equipment, or navigating a facility that was never designed with their mobility in mind.

Those are not necessarily diving problems. Sometimes they are logistics problems.

That distinction matters because changing the logistics may be all that is necessary. Move the equipment closer to the water. Assemble it somewhere else. Use a different entry. Put the gear on in the water. Change who carries what.

There is no prize for making somebody overcome an unnecessary obstacle simply because that is how we have always run the class.

Support Without Taking Over

One of the easiest mistakes to make when trying to help somebody is helping too much.

A diver may already have an effective way to manage a task. If the instructor or support diver immediately grabs equipment, moves the student, or takes control without understanding what is needed, the assistance can become another obstacle.

Good support should increase the diver’s independence whenever possible, not replace it.

That means communicating before acting, understanding what the diver wants or needs, and learning where assistance is actually useful.

Sometimes that means hands-on support. Sometimes it means being nearby and ready. Sometimes it means doing absolutely nothing.

The Workshops Are Where This Gets Interesting

The course includes knowledge development, two confined-water skill-development workshops, and two open-water workshops.

The confined-water workshops give us room to experiment. We can look at familiar skills, change the circumstances, explore different approaches, and work through what happens when the standard demonstration does not fit the diver.

The open-water workshops add the environment back into the equation. Entries and exits, equipment movement, depth, buoyancy, communication, site access, and buddy positioning all become part of the problem-solving process.

That is where the course becomes much more than a discussion about inclusion. You actually have to look at a situation, decide what needs to change, try something, evaluate the result, and adjust.

Which, conveniently, is pretty much what teaching is supposed to be.

Adaptive Techniques Makes You a Better Instructor

The obvious application is working with students with disabilities.

The larger lesson is learning not to become trapped by your own teaching script.

Students misunderstand explanations. Bodies move differently. Fear changes how people process information. Equipment fits differently. One student learns by watching while another needs to understand why the skill works before any of it makes sense.

The more tools you have as an instructor, the less likely you are to decide that a student is the problem simply because your first explanation did not work.

Adaptive teaching pushes you to look at the objective instead of becoming overly attached to one particular route to get there.

That is useful with every student you teach.

Adaptive Techniques vs. Adaptive Support Diver

These are related courses, but they are designed for different people.

Adaptive Techniques is the professional-level specialty. It is designed for qualified PADI professionals and focuses on supervising, teaching, adapting techniques, evaluating student performance, and making appropriate training decisions.

Adaptive Support Diver is designed for certified divers and freedivers who want to become better buddies to divers with disabilities. It includes one confined-water workshop and one open-water workshop rather than the larger professional training program.

If you are a PADI professional, Adaptive Techniques is the course that gives you the broader instructional framework.

What Equipment Will We Use?

You will use normal scuba or freediving equipment appropriate for the training environment.

Depending on the workshops and the techniques we are exploring, we may also experiment with equipment configurations, support techniques, or other adaptations intended to address a particular need.

There is no universal box of “adaptive equipment” that solves everything. Sometimes specialized equipment is appropriate. Sometimes ordinary scuba equipment simply needs to be configured or used differently.

The equipment follows the diver and the objective, not the other way around.