Instructor-Led Training & Instructor’s Guides
Behind the Wheel Driver’s Ed
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Behind the Wheel Driver's Ed is a driving school in Cincinnati, Ohio. They teach new drivers age 15½ and older how to drive, both with in person classroom lessons and in-car lessons behind the wheel.
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Ohio law requires all students who are between the ages of 15 and 5 months and 18 years old to complete 24 hours of classroom instruction. This can be done either online or in person with a licensed instructor.
BTW is one of the few driving schools in the area who still hosts in-person classroom instruction. It's one of their many differentiators. The owner and president is their sole classroom instructor; the other five instructors all teach in-car behind-the-wheel lessons only.
When BTW was first incorporated in 2021, they did not have a classroom curriculum of their own. They contracted me to create and maintain their classroom curriculum for them.
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Knowing that there are many other options out there for students to complete their state-mandated 24 hours of classroom instruction (all of them being more flexible, as they're online and completed at the students' pace), we wanted to create an experience for the students who chose BTW over the competition. It was important to the owner that the sessions we wrote up were a differentiator, met students where they were, and were timeless enough that other instructors could pick it up and do just as good of a job as he would.
That said, we designed 6 classroom sessions (4 hours' in duration each) that included games, activities, discussions, videos - and as much fun as can be crammed into some of the most boring, dry material imaginable.
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The owner/president of BTW and I sat down for ~50 hours over the course of several months so he could download all of his 15 years of driving instructor knowledge into my brain. I took diligent notes so I could create something beautiful and engaging for him and his students.
We spitballed ideas for games that would optimize knowledge transfer via memorable and silly moments to solidify important concepts in students' minds, and we leveraged state-approved resources for videos to help break up the amount of time he needed to speak in a given session (and so students had multiple modalities with which to receive information).
I started by determining the style guide for the presentations, creating a Slide Master to make designing easier (and to keep any edits he needed to make on the fly in compliance with the guide). I used his company logo, and his feedback, to come up with the look/feel of the style guide. This same philosophy is what I used for the rest of the tools I've created for him (e.g., Instructor's Guides, Interview Guide, Process Documentation).
I took all of my notes and his ideas and designed all six classes. We made edits together before he road tested the curriculum for the first time in June 2021.
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Since launching the first iteration of the curriculum, it's gone through many updates. Most recently, in the summer of 2023, I did a full overhaul, creating a new style guide and changing up the layout of many slides, including changing the order of some concepts. I used feedback from the owner, who has now taught this curriculum using these materials hundreds of times, to update the materials.
Some of the games that I did not think would land in a million years are some of the kids' favorites, including when they are asked to make a poster for train safety, and when they get a new hat or pair of sunglasses for each attribute that's important to them to consider when buying a car.
The biggest driver of increased business for BTW is from student referral - and many of those referrals come directly from students who attended classroom in person.
Snippets of the Presentation
(and a behind-the-scenes look at the slides)
Instructor’s Guides
**Used with permission