How to Teach a Defensive Driving Class

Your driving skills are impeccable and you know good drivers need to drive defensively, not aggressively, so you want to teach these skills to others. Combine your love of driving and teaching to help others drive defensively and keep the roads a little safer.

Instructions

1. Understand what qualifications you need to teach driving. Make sure you have a driver's license and a driving instructor's license. Check your state or province to see if you need a written test, an in-car test or both. You may also need a criminal record check in some areas.

2. Make sure you have plenty of driving experience and a clean driving record. You should know the rules of the road and be able to spot a potential problem.

3. Develop a curriculum outlining defensive driving techniques, safety, legal issues, driver responsibility, collision prevention techniques and winter driving tips. Deliver your lessons with clear instructions using good communication skills.

4. Explain that driving can be stressful when you get behind the wheel as a new driver, but students can feel safer by learning to drive defensively.

5. Teach students to watch what they are doing and to watch what others are doing. Students should drive carefully and stay calm at all times.

6. Tell them to yield to other drivers, drive within the speed limit and stop at yellow lights instead of speeding up. They should also drive according to the weather, which means knowing how to recover from sliding or hydroplaning.

7. Show students how to drive cautiously by watching the road, especially blind spots, looking out for hidden driveways and intersections and driving with a safe distance between themselves and other cars.

Tips & Warnings

• Make sure they don't forget the basics like taking care of their cars, using signals, using headlights, sharing the road, slowing down, using mirrors and not following too closely.

• Tell students never to stop on the highway and to have an escape route at all times.