Review after each lesson#

You review your progress whether you mean to or not. Halfway through a flying lesson you reach for an item on the checklist and it isn’t there — you’ve just discovered a gap in your own performance. The question is what you do with that. Most people register it, wince, and fly on. The lesson review is the small, deliberate habit of stopping after each session to do it properly: what worked, why, and what changes next time.

Here’s what I used to miss. A lesson review isn’t only a planning tool — it’s also one of your best chances to cement the lesson. When you sit down a few hours later and reconstruct the session from memory — the route, the calls you made, where it went sideways — you’re pulling the material back out of your head, and pulling something out is what makes it stick. So this is a review that fixes problems and doubles as practice.

Do it from memory first, then check your notes#

The instinct is to open your notes and read back over what you did. Resist it — at least at the start. Reading your notes again feels like reviewing, but recognising something on the page isn’t the same as being able to produce it, and that gap is exactly the trap the enquire phase is built to catch.

So run it the hard way round. Shut the notes and write down, from memory, everything you can recall — what you were aiming at, what came out, where it broke down. Then open your log, flight plan or score sheet and fill the gaps. That order matters more than it looks: reconstructing the lesson before you check is a retrieval attempt, and retrieving from memory builds far more durable learning than reviewing it again — the well-established testing effect (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). The blanks you couldn’t fill aren’t failures; they’re a precise map of what hasn’t stuck yet.

This is also why the timing of the review carries weight. Done within a few hours, while the session is still recoverable, it works as a first spaced repetition — and spacing your encounters with material over time, rather than cramming them together, is one of the most reliable ways to make learning last (Cepeda et al., 2006). The lesson is the first exposure; the review that evening is the second; a glance at your assertions next week is the third. You’re laying down a spacing schedule almost by accident.

When to write it, and what goes in#

Write your review as soon as you reasonably can after the lesson — within a few hours, before the details blur. If you debrief with a coach, trainer or instructor, capture points while you talk; if they won’t give you that time straight after, consider finding one who will.

During the lesson you can’t stop to write an essay, so leave yourself breadcrumbs. Correct any mistake in the moment, then jot a quick marker to come back to — a single symbol works (a target, ‘⌖’). Note what went well too, not just the errors. Mine any working notes you keep anyway — meeting notes, flight plans, score sheets — for points you’d otherwise forget. And you can ask someone to watch and note for you: in presentation training, give a friend in the audience a few things to track — speech rate, volume, pauses, pitch — and let them catch what you can’t see from the inside.

I split my own reviews into two parts: a short overview and the outcomes. From my flight training, the overview captured the frame of the session:

The date and time of the lesson.
The particular aircraft I flew, and any issues with it.
The basic lesson plan — the route and the learning objectives for the day.
Whether my instructor or any passengers were aboard.
The weather: wind, cloud, visibility, rain.
How I felt — alert, tired, excited, bored, challenged, overworked — and anything that changed before, during or after the flight.

The outcomes are where the learning lives:

What I did well, and why (worth naming — you want to repeat it deliberately, not by luck).
New techniques I tried, and whether they actually worked.
Assertions: the specific things I want to do better next time.

Vary the depth to suit the activity. For a low-stakes session a few lines is plenty; don’t treat this as a ritual to perform in full every time. Take what’s useful.

Mark the issues, then dig for the root cause#

Once you’ve got everything down, go back over each point and grade it by how much it actually matters. For anything carrying real risk, I mark three levels:

C — Critical. Could have led to a loss, failure or safety problem if uncorrected. It needn’t have happened — the point is it could have.
P — Procedural. Maybe not critical, but you didn’t follow the correct procedure.
G — General. Not critical or procedural, but doing it right would lift your overall competence.

Now take at least the critical items and ask what really caused them. A simple, sturdy tool for this is the Five Whys: ask “why did that happen?” five times in a row, each answer feeding the next question. Say I’d taxied across an active runway without permission:

Issue: “I taxied across an active runway without permission.”

Why? I forgot to ask for permission.

Why did you forget? I was at the end of a long flight and just glad to be on the ground.

Why so glad? The flight was busy and stressful. I relaxed too early.

Why was it stressful? I hadn’t planned enough, and I was tired.

Why not enough planning? I stayed out late the night before, slept in, and rushed the plan.

Keep going as long as it’s useful, and double back on earlier answers — start again at “why was it stressful?” and you’ll surface different issues. The value is real: critical problems rarely arrive alone. They’re usually the end of a short chain of smaller ones, and the Five Whys is a plain way to walk back up that chain instead of stopping at the first obvious cause.

Turn issues into actions#

A root cause you’ve named but done nothing about will happen again. So convert each one into concrete actions. Roughly: five for a critical issue, three for a procedural one, one or two for a general one — the count just nudges you to think harder about the things that matter most.

Resist the lazy conclusion. It’s tempting to read the runway example as “don’t go out the night before” and call it done. Look instead at every point the whys threw up, and you’ll find several useful moves:

Add an assertion to consciously trigger a permission check every time you’re about to taxi across a runway.
Add a mnemonic letter to the end of your post-landing checklist to “plan” the path back to the hangar, including any active runways.
Add an assertion to stay alert and aware until the keys are handed back at the school — with extra alertness after a long flight.
Add an entry to your planning checklist to route via easier paths.
Add an entry to your planning checklist to check whether you’ve planned enough.
Add an assertion that if you do go out the night before, you fly later the next day or finish planning beforehand.

Some of these are checklist edits; the more interesting ones become assertions — short statements of how you intend to perform. And here’s where the review loops back to where this page started: that assertions list is exactly the kind of thing worth reviewing on a spacing schedule, so the lessons you mined the hard way actually carry into the next flight rather than fading by the weekend. Keep your “five whys” and “five actions” with the review notes, capture them into your detailed review log , and promote the important ones into your summary list.

Takeaway#

A lesson review earns its keep twice. Run it from memory before you check your notes, and the effort of reconstructing the session is itself retrieval practice that cements the lesson — not just a record of it. Do it within a few hours and you’ve started a spacing schedule without trying. Grade what matters, walk the critical issues back to their root with the Five Whys, and turn each root cause into specific actions and assertions you’ll actually revisit. Then it rolls into your next plan — which is the whole point of running learning as a loop .