Over Teaching VS. Under Teaching: Which is better?
*Disclaimer: I write this blog post only to give my opinion. I respect the teaching decisions made by each and every instructor and believe fully that each class should be taught and tailored to individual needs and circumstances. This post, as they all are, is based on what I have observed in my own classes and programs and will not represent a method that will work for each and every class.
As a new instructor, one of the hardest skills for me to develop is writing lesson plans. If we’re being honest, we could break it down further to say that I have a very hard time coming up with activities for my classes. More often than not I will have a skill I want to work on during class time in place before I will have even have an activity set in stone that will practice that skill. I’m not really sure why I’m like that; maybe it’s because I was the kid that beyond the age of about ten hated playing any kind of “gym time” games (sorry to my summer camp counselors that tried to get me to join into after dinner games. I just wanted to ride the horses), but for whatever reason, I spend A LOT of time racking my brain trying to coming up with fun activities for my students during class.
Because of this, I’ve came to be the type of instructor that finds one good lesson plan and uses it for all of my classes throughout the week, with minor adjustments and tweaking where needed. Let me tell you though, finding one lesson that fits a broad range of extremely unique abilities in multiple classes is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and because of this I learned, early on, that no lesson is ever going to be 100% perfect. You can literally spend hours with your nose to the grindstone writing what you believe to be the perfect lesson only to find that,when you step in the arena, everything goes haywire. It’s too far over your riders’ heads, it’s difficult for volunteers to follow, you end up having to spend the forty-five minutes of class time policing everyone inside and outside of the arena so there are no collisions, the list goes on and on. When I first started teaching I had so many days like this that my motto became: “Keep calm and pretend it’s on the lesson plan”! Thankfully these days are long behind me at this point (or at least I hope so)!
One of the hardest parts about teaching a therapeutic riding class, especially when you’re a rider yourself, is striving to find the common, middle ground between teaching serious skills and still having fun in the process. As I said before, I am a rider myself. In the eight years that I have been riding I have come to a conclusion that I think most riders can agree with me on: Riding can be, at times, downright hard! If you’ve ever been on the back of a horse, you know what I mean. You have to make sure your reins aren’t too tight or too loose, that you’re giving the horse enough leg, you’re looking where you want to go, and more. So for me, as both a rider and an instructor, I want my students to walk away from a lesson feeling as though they have gained a valuable new skill that can help them to better pilot their mounts next time time they set foot in the arena. But because of this mentality (which is in no way bad or harmful in the slightest) I have found myself,recently, starting to lose the light feeling my classes used to have. And when pointed out to me by someone I highly respect in our program, I was slapped with the realization that sometimes it is better to under teach and have more fun during a class than to continually over teach and lose the interest of your riders and volunteers.
If I'm going to be 100% honest with myself, I flip flop on the issue I want to cover in this post quite frequently. Which is better, over teaching or under teaching? As I said before, I want my riders to learn the necessary skills to ride to their fullest potential. And I don't feel that there is anything wrong with that goal. I personally have seen countless instances in my own classes where I'll be teaching along and all of a sudden realize that a student I didn't think would understand the skill I was teaching is trying their hardest to do what I am asking of them. This happened to me the other day, in fact, when I was teaching a group of riders how to properly use leg aids (the use of your legs and feet to help steer your horse). It was cool to see how the slight prompting of using their legs and reins together to communicate to their horses that they wanted to steer in and out of a line of cones was amazing to me!
On the same token though, under teaching can have its benefits as well. When I say under teaching, I am meaning when a lesson consists of mostly games and fun activities instead of focusing on one particular skill. Unlike over teaching where the lessons come across as very heavy, these kinds of classes have a more relaxed and fun feeling to them. They are extremely enjoyable not only for the riders, but the horses and volunteers as well.
I had a chance to teach a class the other day that was more of a laid back class and quite honestly, I hadn't realized how much I missed playing a lot of games with my students instead of focusing extremely hard on teaching riding skills! It was a breathe of fresh air to see just how much the riders enjoyed their forty-five minutes on horseback, even if to me it felt foreign to be playing so many games (something that isn't my strong suite to begin with).
I guess,when it comes down to it, there is no concrete answer to the question of "Over Teaching or Under Teaching: Which is better?". As an instructor you have to know your riders well enough to know when they can handle learning a serious skill and when they need a fun, laid back night to chill and just enjoy riding. Take the time to get to know your students and you will be able to tell!