Anyone know the best way to go about teaching constructed and preconstructed obstacles chapter 6 (Tm 3-34.85/mcrp 3-17a) class?

I heartily agree with your recommendation, but I wonder if he will get any sort of satisfying answer.

I am not saying that a PFC shouldn't be instructing but I have to wonder who his target audience would be. Target audience is the most critical element in preparing for any training. The target audience will impact both the methods of presentation and the content. His question appears to be addressing the WHY rather than the HOW or even WHERE of obstacles.

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I suspect that this might be because his initial entry training covered how quite well, barely touched on where, and never seriously considered why. That emphasis would have been completely appropriate for the Initial Entry Training target audience, but might well have been unsatisfying for someone who thinks things through and was looking for more understanding.

The WHY and WHERE are subjects that are generally considered more applicable to an Officer Advanced Course target audience. At his level the answer to where becomes 'wherever the plan calls for' and the answer to why becomes 'Because that's what the plan says.' Unfortunately those answers aren't very satisfying for people who want to understand what they are doing.

My personal feeling has always been that we should encourage more of that sort of thinking (perhaps because I'm one of the people who used to ask those questions), but throughout most of the Army "because I said so" is still policy and "that's not your skill level" and "stay in your own lane" are still the mantra when people try to understand those whys.

MSG Thomas Currie - "I am not saying that a PFC shouldn't be instructing"
Random observations from a fellow senior NCO.
One of the best ways to become a subject matter expert in a single task, is to train up on that task under knowledgeable supervision, then teach that task to others.
And one of the best ways to empower and instill confidence in a junior SM is to task them to do the above.......
PFC, SPC, or PV2 who is knowledgeable in the assigned task, practiced in its instruction (can you say rehearsals), and supported during the instruction by a senior leader that can assist as needed (NOT TAKE OVER) is a great thing to watch

SGM Erik Marquez - I absolutely agree -- which is why I started by clearly making the point that I was not against the idea of a PFC instructing. My point was the dichotomy between what he was asking and what he might have an opportunity to train. That's why I pointed out that the sort of WHY questions he was asking probably wouldn't have satisfying answers.

By the time you entered service we had already fully adopted performance oriented training so you never saw anything else in the military. The concept of performance oriented training was a great idea -- but like many great ideas that the military adopts, it had some problems with the way it was implemented and a lot of unintended consequences.

The idea behind performance oriented training was to look at the tasks a soldier actually performs, then train the soldier what they need to know, while eliminating all the "useless" information that the military was infamous for teaching. The examples given to support the concept included the idea that a soldier needs to know how to load, aim, and fire the rifle, but does not need to know where the rifle was manufactured or how much it weighs with and without a magazine. That made sense. But we also eliminated training about the cycle of functioning, meaning that if anything didn't function exactly as expected, the soldier had no basis to understand what was wrong, so he can't fix it and probably can't even accurately describe what was wrong.

Like most good ideas, we went a bit too far in eliminating every bit of information that wasn't directly necessary to perform the specific action of each task. And, of course, each task had to BE a specific action that was clearly definable and clearly measurable. Anything that required judgement, discretion, or variable choices that couldn't be clearly defined and measured wasn't a "task" and therefore wasn't important.

Even the language of task oriented training created some inherent problems. Recall that the first word in the conditions for any task is always "Given" -- soldiers tend to take things literally and this quickly became part of our training culture. Whatever you need for a task is going to be "given." If you were training soldiers to tighten the lug nuts on the road wheel of a tank, that task would become "given a 3/4" breaker bar, a 6" extension, and a 1.5" socket..." and that training would be conducted with all the appropriate tools laid out neatly next to a road wheel with a lug nut that needs tightened. At the end of the training all your soldiers would be able to tighten the lug nut. But if you put all the tools back in the tool bag, and put the tool bag back in the sponson box, then walk to the front of the tank and tell PVT Jones "Go tighten the lugnuts on the number three left road wheel" there is at least a 50% chance that he won't know what tools he needs, where to find those tools, and might not even be able to find the number three left road wheel -- because none of that was part of his training.

The overall result was a culture where training (especially junior enlisted training) became teaching monkeys to push buttons. It's easy to teach a monkey that when the blue light comes on, push the red button. The training will be successful and all the monkeys will successfully push the red button whenever the blue light comes on. But none of those monkeys knows what the blue light means or what the red button does. When the next piece of equipment arrives with different lights or different buttons we have to start training from scratch. This kind of training is fine at skill level 1, but we kept the same training strategy all that way from skill level 1 through 4.

Worse, it doesn't to anything to prepare soldiers for the next skill level, because ALL the training is done on that same basis. We add some new tasks at each level but still devote all out training to WHAT to do, without considering WHY we do it.

Some soldiers will figure out the WHY because that's how their individual minds work, but overall we do very little to support them in understanding and often actively discourage asking those WHY and HOW questions.

MSG Thomas Currie - When I first Branch Transferred to the Engineers, the Engineer Platoon leader was the Special Staff Task Force Engineer in mix Mech/Armor Task Force with a Major as the Brigade Engineer and only a company to work the problem. So at that time obstacle integration was a large part of the Platoon Leaders job. When they pushed a Brigade down to Division, and later left a Battalion with the Combat Brigades, that took deployment to the AOC (or whatever they call it today, CCC?). So today, type, design and deployment is a Brigade Level staff position.
The Assistant Brigade Engineer was one of my favorite jobs in the Army.

I used to teach the uses of the obstacles as part of an obstacle group, mainly so that the Soldiers understood why an obstacle had trained to be constructed to standard. It also helped build disciplined initiative when substituting materials that were missing.

The ideal situation is building them on a demo range, then you can breach them when you are done with construction. We didn't have that Assault Breacher when I was still around, but you could do most of that with a CEV. You can always let them do a Bangalore or a field expedient Bangalore, but the reality is that if you are using Engineers and a post filled with C-4 to clear a wire obstacle, things had went pretty far south already.