As snowsports instructors, every lesson we teach is a two-way experience. You focus on your students’ motivations, goals, and progress – helping them unlock new skills, guiding them toward greater confidence, and celebrating the breakthroughs achieved together on snow. However, your own professional growth is also important and depends on turning inward and reflecting on how you performed as an educator.

That’s where the PSIA-AASI Performance Guides come in. They help create a framework for reflection and guide instructors through a thoughtful self-evaluation of the learning experience. While they’re grounded in our national certification standards, these guides are more than exam tools – they’re practical resources you can use every day to sharpen your teaching, refine your skills, and grow as a professional.

From Standards to Daily Practice

At the core of our certification system are learning outcomes and assessment criteria (ACs), which are the measurable points examiners and trainers use to evaluate performance. ACs describe what successful teaching looks like in terms of technical ability and knowledge, teaching skills, and professional interpersonal behaviors (people skills).

Think of ACs as your personal performance guide. They’re not just about assessments – they’re a daily reference for how you’re doing as a Snow Pro.

The Performance Guides expand on each AC by listing performance contributors – the specific details that lead to success or reveal struggles. This practice turns the standards into actionable checkpoints you can observe, reflect on, and apply in your lessons.

The 6-Point Assessment Scale

Your reflection becomes even more meaningful when you pair it with the 6-point assessment scale used across PSIA-AASI credentials (for example, see PSIA Certified Level I Alpine Assessment Form):

1. Essential elements not appearing (early cognitive stage)
2. Essential elements appear but not consistently (late cognitive stage)
3. Essential elements appear more frequently (early associative stage)
4. Essential elements appear regularly with developing consistency (late associative stage)
5. Essential elements appear consistently (early autonomous stage)
6. Essential elements appear consistently at a superior level (late autonomous stage)

This scale is based on the Fitts and Posner model of motor learning, which describes how learners progress from the cognitive stage (thinking about every move), to the associative stage (refining and connecting movements), and finally to the autonomous stage (performing fluidly and naturally). You may wonder how a motor skills development model applies to teaching and people skills. We base the behaviors exhibited when teaching to measurable outcomes/skills in a similar fashion across the model from early cognition to associative and late autonomy.

By looking at your own teaching through this lens, you can better understand not only where you are on the scale, but also what the next step looks like.

A Performance Guide in Action

Here’s how this plays out in practice. Take this assessment criterion:

AC: Promote ongoing reflection about students’ performance and how it relates to their skiing/riding goals.

Successful performance contributors might look like:

• Asking open-ended questions to guide reflection on performance and progress.
• Confirming that students’ reflections match what you observe in their skiing or riding.
• Prompting students to apply learning in varied terrain or conditions and share what they notice.
• Changing speed or tempo to help them explore how it affects performance.
• Encouraging them to connect today’s learning to future goals.

Unsuccessful performance contributors might look like:

• Delivering information without prompting reflection.
• Ignoring inaccurate self-assessments.
• Missing opportunities to link terrain changes to student learning.
• Skipping conversations about how today’s lesson connects to next steps.

After your lesson, you can ask yourself: “Did I ask enough open-ended questions today? Did I help my students connect their experiences to their goals? Where did I miss opportunities to encourage reflection?”

This kind of self-assessment goes beyond a gut feeling – it gives you concrete areas to celebrate, refine, and carry forward into the next lesson.

Reflection in Action

So how do you put the Performance Guides to work in your daily teaching?

1. Post-Lesson Check-In

After each lesson, review one or two ACs in the guide. Ask: Which contributors did I demonstrate well today? Where was I inconsistent?

2. Targeted Growth Goals

Instead of vague goals like “I want to be better at student engagement,” set precise targets: I want to consistently prompt students to describe their learning in varied terrain.

3. Awareness of Learning Stages

Recognizing the Fitts and Posner stages in your own teaching builds empathy for your students. Just as they progress from cognitive to autonomous stages in skiing and riding, you’re progressing through those same stages as an instructor.

4. Long-Term Development

Over time, regularly checking your performance against the guides helps you build consistency and align your daily work with the standards that define professional excellence.

Why It Matters

The ultimate goal of reflection isn’t just your growth – it’s about creating better outcomes for your students. When you refine your ability to manage terrain, ask better questions, or connect learning to goals, your students learn more effectively and enjoy their time on snow even more.

At the same time, reflection gives you ownership of your professional development. Instead of waiting for an assessment or supervisor/trainer feedback, you can track your growth every day.

A Practical Habit for Every Instructor

The next time you wrap up a lesson, don’t just pack up and head home. Pull out the Performance Guide, pick one AC, and rate yourself along the 6-point scale. Then, choose one performance contributor to strengthen tomorrow.

That simple habit – reflecting through the lens of Performance Guides – creates a cycle of continual improvement. Over time, it sharpens your teaching, aligns your work with professional development best practices, and elevates the student learning experience. After all, being a great instructor isn’t just about helping others learn – it’s about being a learner yourself.