The debrief

This page outlines study material for a developing coach. It is informed by the Australian Parachute Federation’s coaching material, and by research into best practice from parallel disciplines such as gymnastics and aviation.

The debrief is the best-evidenced thing a coach does. Structured debriefing improves subsequent performance substantially, and the features that make it work are known: it is aligned to the objective, the student does much of the talking, and it follows a structure.

Ask before you tell

Start by having the student talk you through the jump.

The official answer expected of an Australian coach candidate, faced with a student who flew badly and asks how they did, is essentially to hand the question back: get them to think the dive through first, then discuss it. That is the right instinct and there are three separate reasons for it.

It tests awareness. What the student can recall is a direct measure of how much capacity they had spare. A student who cannot tell you what happened between the exit and the breakoff was saturated, and that is a more important finding than any body-position note you were about to make.

It strengthens memory. Retrieving something strengthens it more than being told it again. The recall itself is a training input.

It surfaces ownership. If something went badly, watch whether they raise it before you do. A student who names their own error is in a completely different coaching position from one who has it pointed out, and you learn something either way.

So the opening move is a question, every time. Then the video.

Coach one thing, chosen from what sits outside tolerance

Watch an experienced indoor coach review footage: they ignore most of the faults visible on screen and coach one thing. The selection is deliberate, and two separate ideas are doing the work:

Bandwidth. Only what falls outside the tolerance is eligible for comment. Inside the tolerance is fine, even if it is not pretty. On a real complex aerial skill, correcting only errors outside a tolerance band produced better retention and continued improvement than correcting everything did.

This project already publishes tolerances, and a heading standard of plus or minus forty-five degrees is exactly what makes “outside tolerance” a decidable question rather than a matter of taste.

The cap. Of the things that are eligible, say the one that matters most. Bandwidth on its own can still leave you with five faults and a demoralised student.

Retention of the skill is half the reason for the cap. The other half is that your student elected to pay for this. A debrief of thirty-five flaws makes improvement look unreachable, and a flyer who stops booking coaching usually keeps jumping, which makes the enjoyment of a session a safety matter as well as a professional one.

Feedback can also do harm. Across a very large body of studies, feedback improves performance on average and makes it worse in more than a third of cases. The working questions are how much feedback to give, and what to aim it at.

The safety exception, which is not negotiable

The one-item cap governs skill faults only.

A safety-critical breach is named every time, acknowledged by the jumper out loud, and acted on. It is never deferred because today’s focus was chin position. Where a jump contains both, the debrief carries two items: the safety item, and the one skill item.

The rule to hold onto, and it is worth saying to students as well as coaches:

If ninety-five percent of the jump was excellent and five percent was dangerous, it was a bad jump.

The ordering matters: a corking incident must never sit as a footnote after four minutes of praise. The rule is also the plain-language version of one this curriculum already applies in assessment, where a failure on a safety-critical criterion means the unit is not yet met regardless of how good the rest of the flying was.

One refinement matters. The rule judges the jump, not the flyer. “That was a bad jump” is about the task. “You are careless” is about the person, and feedback aimed at the person is the most likely way to make performance worse rather than better. Keep it on the jump and the rule works with everything above. Aim it at the student and it becomes the demoralising debrief the rest of this page exists to prevent.

Video needs a cue attached

Showing footage without attaching a specific correction can be worse than showing no footage at all.

A student watching themselves fly badly, with no instruction attached, gets confirmation of something they already know. Pair every clip with a prescriptive cue: what to do instead, in words the student can carry to the next jump. “Watch this bit, and next jump I want your chin down before you commit to the approach.”

A structure that works

Borrowed from fields that debrief high-consequence work formally, and it holds up here:

1. Reaction. How did that feel? Short, and it lets the emotional content out rather than having it leak through the analysis.
2. Analysis. The student recalls, then you work through the objective with the video. This is where the observation-plus-question move belongs: state what you saw specifically, and ask a genuinely curious question about it in the same breath. “You came off level at the second approach and stopped closing. What were you working with there?” You often learn the cause was something you would never have guessed.
3. Summary. The one thing for next jump. Said out loud, agreed, and written in the logbook.

Keep the whole thing to two or three points maximum, which is also what the generic skydiving instructional guidance recommends. End on a win with one improvement focus.

Order matters for anxiety

For many students the pressure in a coached jump is social: flying on camera, in front of a group, with a review coming. That situation is well described in the research. A new, not-yet-automatic movement, performed under observation and evaluation, is the worst case for both nerves and self-consciousness.

Two cheap structural choices help.

The student speaks first, in process language, before the coach or the group. It reduces the sense of being judged from outside and it doubles as the recall test.

Weigh the group debrief. A shared review is efficient, and it concentrates the evaluative load on whoever flew worst. Consider debriefing the weakest performance privately.

What to write down

The jump, the criteria results, and the one thing for next time, in the student’s logbook, naming the unit and the skill. An entry naming what was assessed and what comes next turns the logbook into a training record that stays legible months later.

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Advisory, educational content. Techniques and standards are guides, and the authority to train and assess belongs to your national federation and your drop zone. Some material on this page is drawn from contributed coach-development notes.