National Standards: Adaptive Update

RM Instructor to Instructor: National Standards: Adaptive Update

Christina Bruno, PSIA-ASSI RM Adaptive Education Staff

You may have heard different terminology being used lately from your trainers, Rocky Mountain education staff, snowsports directors, or other instructors. Some of these words may have been “Assessment Activities,” “Assessment Criteria,” or “Learning Outcomes” related to updating the national standards in each discipline through a strategic alignment process across each PSIA-AASI region. This has been a multi-year process to update the national standards to reflect the changing needs of our snowsports education environment. The updated standards are built on the Learning Connection framework encompassing people skills, teaching skills, and technical skills. Recently the standards for snowboard, telemark, cross country, alpine, and children’s specialist have been updated and published, however you may have noticed on thesnowpros.org site that adaptive standards have not been updated yet. So “what is the progress of the adaptive standards” you may ask?

The adaptive national standards are currently in a review process before they are accepted and published. The Adaptive Standards Committee had to take a different approach to updating the standards than the other disciplines. The national standards by both Alpine and Snowboard had to be completed first before the Adaptive standards could begin to shape, using the alpine and Snowboarding (technical) fundamentals, people skills fundamentals, and teaching skills fundamentals as the foundation for the adaptive standards that are modified to meet the needs of the wide range of disciplines within adaptive.

Once the Adaptive standards are approved, they will be published online and the process for creating the Performance Guides, which hold detailed information on successful and unsuccessful performance contributors as they relate to the assessment criteria of the national standards, will begin. Because Adaptive covers a range of disciplines involving different equipment, assistive tools, and diagnoses, unlike the other discipline Performance Guides, there will be a Performance Guide for each of the disciplines within adaptive (some that share similar characteristics may be grouped together). There is still a lot of work ahead to finish the alignment process for adaptive, but once completed should give the membership clearer, more valuable assessment experience and adaptive instructor pathway.

To learn more about the updated standards and new terminology used in certification standards, check out: Certification Standards – PSIA-AASI (thesnowpros.org)