One of the highlights of my summer was watching my son Graham learn how to ride a bike. He’s only 3 years old- so I was blown away when he took off without training wheels on the 3rd day of riding. I’m pretty sure I didn’t ride a two-wheeler until I was like ten, and that was after many, many knee-skinning spills! How did Graham do it? His secret is using a balance bike and avoiding the pitfalls of “training wheel teaching”, which is a metaphor that I think will serve me well in my own classroom.
Last summer when we were shopping around for a tricycle for Graham, a friend recommended buying a balance bike instead (a bike with only two wheels, but no pedals). They claimed the balance bikes help kids to learn how to balance so well that their own child skipped training wheels and went right to a two-wheeler when they were older. I was intrigued, but a little skeptical: training wheels have been around since the early 1900s helping generation after generation learn how to ride a bike- was there really a better way? The more I looked into it though, the more excitement I found about the benefits of the new balance bike design, and so we bought it (literally and figuratively!).
For the next year, Graham loved riding on his balance bike. At first he was basically walking around with a bike between his legs, but pretty soon he figured out that he could pick up his feet and start to glide around. When he discovered that he could roll down small hills and “balance” with his feet outstretched he was smitten, and he would do this over and and over again with glee. I was impressed- he was certainly learning how to balance.
Then this summer we put him on his first real bike, without any training wheels. He had never pedaled before, so that became a huge distraction and his sense of balance seemed to go out the window. After two days of this he could pedal the bike forward, but only at the cost of my aching back as I had to jog behind him with my hands on his sides to prevent disaster. The few times I tried pulling my hands away he would shout “Don’t let go!” until I came back. He was leaning hard against me the whole time and I was wondering how long my back would last before the training wheels would need to be re-attached…
But on day 3 it happened. His bike picked up speed on a gradual downhill, his weight came off my hands as the bike straightened, and I let go. Graham biked down the hill on his own, until he came to a gliding stop and I had to rush back in to catch his fall. From then on it was “No holding dad!”. His balance came back and he was riding all on his own. Now I’m convinced: balance bikes really are a better way to learn, and they should make training wheels completely obsolete.
What about in my own classroom? Do I teach science with training wheels or a balance bike? The concept of “scaffolding” instruction is a classic one in education that teachers all use- breaking down complex skills into small, discrete steps and aiding students to take those steps until they have enough practice that the scaffolding can be removed and the students can do the complex skill independently. But how can you tell if your scaffolded teaching is a training wheel or a balance bike?
Balance bikes teach the skill that’s the most critical and difficult to learn for biking: the balancing. It takes a lot of practice to develop an intuitive feel for balancing, and training wheels don’t teach this skill because they take the opportunity for falling away. In effect, training wheels only teach you the lesser skills of biking: pedaling, braking, steering. Most of us can probably remember the terror of the training wheels being taken away and the sudden realization that you don’t really know how to ride a bike after all. Without the critical skill of balancing, none of the other sub-skills are very useful (except maybe braking to avoid hitting that tree!). Whereas after being on a balance bike, it only took my son a few days to pick up the easier sub-skills, and without any traumatic experiences either.
This year, whenever I’m scaffolding instruction, I will be careful to make sure my scaffolding is a balance bike, not a training wheel. I need to identify the critical skills and assist students in practicing those first to develop fluency, and not get bogged down in sub-skills that they can pick up later.
Here’s an example: our first unit of the year in 6th grade science is an introduction to science inquiry- basically learning how scientists do science. The over-arching learning goal is how to design and conduct a controlled experiment, so there’s a lot of different skills involved: asking a scientific question, making a testable hypothesis, identifying and controlling variables, collecting and analyzing data, drawing conclusions and asking new questions. In the past I have treated these skills fairly equally with a series of scaffolded activities designed to teach individual skills, leading up to an independently designed and conducted experiment. The results have always been very mixed, which I chalked up to 6th graders simply needing more practice. But what if there was a better “balance bike” way to learn?
Some of the science inquiry skills are more easily picked up than others, and some are more critical to creating a decent scientific experiment. If you value substance over surface, I think you would agree that the most critical skill is controlling variables to ensure that the experiment’s results are valid and reliable. Who cares about how detailed a procedure is or how neatly graphed the data is if the experiment is off the mark or the data is junk? In my opinion, being able to identify and control the variables in an experiment is the most important science inquiry skill, and the one that students struggle with the most.
So instead of my typical series of training wheel teaching activities for science inquiry, I’m going to try to address the critical skill first and foremost like a balance bike does. The first few experiments we do will all focus on the variables: Are we collecting the right data to answer our question (validity)? Are we collecting accurate data (reliability)? To explore this deeply I’m thinking of having teams design their own simple experiments and then assess each other’s to make sure it’s valid and reliable. Only after students have a good sense of variables will we move on to the sub-skills of writing a reproducible procedure, collecting and graphing data, and drawing a well thought-out conclusion. I look forward to seeing how well this new “balanced” approach works!
My name is Nick Mitchell, and I love the art and science of teaching.
The Scientific Teacher 
As I move into providing the August PD for science teachers– I am going to raise this question– is it balance or is it training wheels?
Awesome Gaile- I’m glad the idea was helpful! I’ve been mulling it over for a few days since I thought of it, and I think it’s a really useful metaphor for teaching. Identifying and prioritizing the most important skills amid a long list of standards is something I know I need to do more of!
It is an interesting metaphor with many implications. Imagine if you took the same approach except that you prioritized other skills. If you gave him handle bars first, would he have had proficiency in steering? If you gave him pedals on an axle would he have been comfortable pedaling when he got on that bike? I would argue no.
Because the balancing skill was acquired in pursuit of an objective (having fun), it became valuable to him; this gave the skill context. I can’t imagine the alternative being as productive since they would only have the context of riding an actual bike–something that would have had little to no context for him until he got on one.
But wouldn’t a more integrated approach be most effective? Starting with training wheels and raising them gradually would teach all the skills simultaneously. It would possibly even reveal synergies that could not be realized otherwise; like the connections between speed and balance and steering?
I now need to figure out a classroom parallel to determine if that analysis was useful!! 🙂 Thanks for getting my brain working before the start of the school year!
Doug- thanks for the thoughtful comment, you’ve got my brain working too! I think you have a really good point about skills being learned in context. If you take the balancing skill out of the bike context it wouldn’t be very fun for one, and I agree that you would probably loose some synergy between skills. However, I don’t think that means a fully integrated approach is necessarily the best way to go. When people learn a new complex skill, I think you have to focus your attention on one detail at a time. Like when I first learned to drive a car, most of my attention was on the speedometer because I was focused on learning how to accelerate properly, but that also meant that I was ignoring all the cars around me!
So I think going with a fully integrated approach from the beginning might backfire- what if students focus on a non-critical skill (which might be natural if it’s easier)? They may end up wasting a lot of the time learning non-critical skills that don’t amount to much overall learning. I think it’s more efficient to learn in a progression that addresses the most important skills first, but I like your point of keeping it in context. If you go too far isolating skills students may not be able to use them together. That’s why I think balance bikes are so successful- they focus attention on the key skill, while still keeping it in the context of biking.
I’ll definitely experiment with this approach in my Science Inquiry unit this fall and post again with some feedback on how it goes.
Excellent points. This has me thinking that when I look to teach a complex skill, I first need to identify and present the individual concepts. But for that to be effective, I might need to find a context for the less critical concepts that will engage the students. So basically the less critical concepts could be taught from the perspective of being a critical concept in a completely different context. Going back to the bike analogy, some type of toy would need to be developed that isolates the pedaling skill and somehow rewards proficiency. Maybe a stationary bike that plays a song at a speed proportional to the speed being pedaled?
I like your thought process (and your product idea! :))- but the best context is probably simply the task itself (or something that closely resembles it). Once students have mastered the critical skills they should be able to engage in the actual task (be it riding a bike or doing an experiment) and then learn those less critical “add-on skills”. So for my science students, I will start with a focus on choosing appropriate variables for their experiments, and then we can “add-on” skills like recording and graphing data, writing a clear procedure, and drawing thoughtful conclusions. They should learn these efficiently once they’re engaged in doing experiments, the same way my son was able to quickly learn how to pedal after he mastered balancing.
[…] data, and drawing conclusions. We start off the year in 6th grade with this unit, for more on why, check out this post. It is a very hands-on unit to get students active in lab right away with short activities and […]