Those of you who teach- how do you work against someone's inflated ego?
Patience is #1. And staying calm. The only time you should yell is if someone does something dangerous that's possibly fatal. The only time you should front someone off during class time is if they are being insufferably stupid, wasting training time, and you think you might have to drop them.
Teaching civilians or law enforcement personnel is nothing like teaching military. You can't yell. Even when one student drops her mag on every draw and presentation on every string of fire.
You know it's working when a student/cadet comes up to you after an evolution and says, "How can you be so calm when you're seeing all this stupidity?" For me, it helps that I have always been good about removing my own ego from the equation. Of course, there were times when I'd have to remind myself I had nothing to prove to anyone.
The Socratic method actually works even teaching firearms, especially lethal force concepts. Sometimes asking someone a series of questions, rather than simply lecturing them, will lead them to realize they don't know what they don't know.
the first thing is to not be a know it all as an instructor.
Well, at some point, you
do have to make it clear that you know more than the students -- at least as far as the course syllabus, the methods you're teaching, and the expectations of skills the students need to master, You don't have to let them know that you can completely disassemble a Dillon M-134D down to the last pin, bolt and spring, or that you wrote the training manual on ops plans for DEVGRU or whatever. And sometimes it was okay to disclose one was a tactical team leader... In law enforcement, a lot of the folks did disingenuously question the credibility of the instructors. Guys just out of the military did this a lot. "I was in Afghanistan five months ago. So how long have you worked here?"
To be clear, our cadre sometimes brought on ourselves, because we did have some guys with big egos (one instructor who wasted the first hour of each first day reviewing his bio and CV with the class so everyone knew what a big deal he was.
This wasn't so much of an issue when I first started instructing in the military. But two things came into confluence over the past couple decades, the GWOT, which provided a lot of young people extensive combat experience, and the advent of first-person shooter and other action video games. I don't know which is worse as far as affecting someone's ability to understand the requirements for law enforcement and armed citizen carry and use of firearms, which are not close to the ROE when you're humping the Hindu Kush or clearing a block in Fallujah. And learning how to be a patrol officer or an armed citizen legally carrying concealed is nothing like what's depicted in any video games.
Around 2010, I first noticed I'd get challenged in almost every class by one or two of the young males in the academy program, trying to determine my "gunfighting" experience (and therefore, whether or not I was actually worthy of trying to impart my paltry knowledge to them) and resisting some methods we taught. Believing that what they learned in the military or from Uncle Joe at deer camp in Wisconsin was superior to our curriculum. And then there was the guy who argued some aspect of shooting the M-4, as that's not how it was used in "Call of Duty." Seriously.
I got in the habit of taking these guys aside (trying to do it during breaks, but occasionally had to stop the class in the middle of a lecture or course of fire) and calmly explaining to them that their job was to learn all the state statutes applicable to use of deadly force, all the department policies on use of deadly force, our courses of fire, our way of administratively handling firearms, our way of setting up gear, etc., and, on a couple occasions, I had to warn someone that I had the power to recommend their termination for failure to satisfactorily and safely complete the firearms training, and they likely would never work in law enforcement (in our state, at least) afterward.