Scoot Bike Pedagogy
How you learn to ride matters
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Last Christmas we got our four-year-old a pedal bike. He was ecstatic. He ripped the wrapping paper to shreds and dragged me out to our cul-de-sac to give it its maiden voyage on a perfect 70-degree Southern California Christmas morning. Within ten minutes of hopping on, he was motoring around in a circle having the time of his life.
What set him up to get the hang of it so quickly? Lots of practice on a scoot bike. All of us teachers have something important to learn from scoot bikes. It's what I call scoot bike pedagogy. It's the secret that will help you to help your students to learn effectively, even in the face of disruption from generative AI.
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Analog transfer learning
Learning to ride a bike has a lot of great lessons that transfer to other domains. Like many worthwhile endeavors, learning to ride a bike is a struggle and requires consistent effort, repeated failures, and probably a few bumps and bruises before it clicks.
But even beyond the general learning process, the two most common methods for learning to ride illustrate important aspects of effective teaching. The two general strategies for teaching a kid to ride a bike are a scoot bike or training wheels. There's not much of a debate about which is better. It's gotten to the point that when I see kids at the park with training wheels on, I feel sorry for them. The scoot bike is a superior way to learn in almost every respect.
It doesn't take much thought to see why. It's all about aligning the learning process with the most important foundational skills. For riding a bike, the fundamental skill is learning how to balance on two wheels. Training wheels eliminate this most challenging part of learning to ride a bike. The scoot bike isolates it.
Balance is the fundamental skill that unlocks riding a bike. Your success learning to ride a bike is almost directly correlated to your ability to master this one skill. Figure it out, and learning how to steer and pedal is a piece of cake. Soon you'll be like my four-year-old, cruising down the street.
Scoot bike pedagogy is about helping students develop a stable foundation for their craft
I'm coining a new term to describe the application of this framework more broadly: scoot bike pedagogy. The fundamental tenant of scoot bike pedagogy is that learning experiences should be aligned with the core learning objectives we're trying to help students learn. Scoot bike pedagogy might sound obvious, but it's crazy how many people still believe in training wheels.
The big thing right now in many educational spaces is figuring out what to do about generative artificial intelligence. Scoot bike vs. training wheels pedagogy helps not only to make sense of whatever disruption is happening because of AI but also to provide a path forward. Generative AI is a training wheel buster. The consternation we're seeing in response to generative AI is directly correlated to the amount of training wheel pedagogy we're relying on.
Put these glasses on, look around, and you'll see it everywhere. Training wheel pedagogy is littered throughout our educational system. You can spot it anywhere an assignment or activity is scaffolded in such a way that it develops unhealthy dependencies, just like training wheels build unhealthy dependencies in the process of learning to ride a bike. The five-paragraph essay? Training wheels. The book report? Training wheels. The rote memorization and regurgitation without meaningful synthesis and application? Training wheels.
Listen, students need scaffolds to learn. It's not helpful just to let them loose and see what happens without direction. However, lecturing or asking students to summarize information instead of understanding and applying it in new contexts is not helping students to learn as effectively as we could. We need to focus on scaffolds that help students build the most important foundational skills without simultaneously teaching them to rely on structures that encourage imbalance.
Generative AI busts training wheel pedagogy
Ultimately this is good news, but it will require us to respond. Generative AI has forced the issue and will make training wheel pedagogy increasingly untenable. In the places where we've relied on training wheel pedagogy—assignments that do not get buy-in from students or are tenuously linked to building a craft—AI is going to wreak havoc. Let it.
In response, we should rethink our teaching methods, course curricula, and learning objectives. Here are some things I'm thinking about this summer as I prepare for the fall.
Write it for real: If students write something, make it count. Write for a broader audience than just a single professor or one of their peers taking the class alongside them. Consider encouraging them to share it beyond the walls of the classroom and share it on the web. Help them to learn the power building in public.
Focus on active participation: With the increasing availability of high quality content available for free on the Internet, the model of the classroom primarily as a place of information delivery is dying, if it’s not already dead. Let's go back to the drawing board and think about how to use the time we have together more effectively in ways that help students to synthesize what they are learning. There are little steps to be taken here. Consider replacing even one or two lectures in your class this fall or experimenting with more group activities during class time.
Reflect on the process and the purpose: The rapid advances in generative AI of late are disorienting. What will the future look like? Why are we here? What is the purpose of an education? We would all get value from spending some time exploring and answering these questions together. We may not know what the future holds, but we still know what to teach young people.
Build trust and relationship: At the root of it all, education is about relationships. The relationship between a student and a teacher, a student and a discipline, a student and themselves. Time spent helping students realize that education is personal, not personalized is time well spent.
Even if you're using scoot bike pedagogy AI will impact your teaching practice. It may require that we modify our practices and the assignments, even if they are aligned with building the skills that matter—skills like learning how to think critically, analyze evidence, build an argument, effectively communicate, and grow in character. Whatever we do, let's buy more scoot bikes and throw out the training wheels.
Got a comment? I’d love to hear it.
Reading Recommendations
Here are a few things that I’ve enjoyed reading recently.
writes a thoughtful response to the meme making the rounds: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” Maybe good art springs from the labor that we might otherwise think is meaningless.Whatever you make about my claims regarding mundane labors and the work of the artist—and artists among you please do tell me how you think about this—I am quite confident that we must resist the temptation to imagine that the path to a meaningful or satisfying life is secured by the unquestioning acceptance of the promise of time-and labor-saving technologies. More often than we might realize, those labors themselves work on us, making us the kind of people who can make good art and fashion a good life.
The poem “On Children” from Khalil Gibran.
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.The Book Nook
I’ve had a number of wide-ranging conversations lately about the future of higher ed. The Building the Intentional University has been on my list for a while now but I’m finally getting the chance to dig in. It is written to share the thought process behind the creation of Minerva University and to compare Minerva to existing models in higher ed. A very interesting read so far.
The Professor Is In
Hard to believe that the end of June is almost here. My students are just about halfway done with their 10-week summer research experiences and are making great progress. They’ve been working well together so far and I’m excited to see the progress that they’re making. This week we got our new shiny pco.panda sCMOS cameras which I am excited to unpack and get set up. Time is flying, but we’re having fun!
Leisure Line
Last week we went to the beach for a day. The kids had a blast, we found some sand crabs, and we even saw someone catch a guitarfish.
Still Life
At the LA Zoo last week I got a picture of this California Ground Squirrel. Pretty cute!
Loved the comments about (i) going beyond simply asking students to regurgitate information and (ii) using the classroom in a more meaningful way than simply presenting information to students. The regurgitation points supports the idea of using facilitation rather than lecturing to have students understand concepts in terms of their experiences with them.
Useful analogy! Thank you. To extend it, I think of the ratio between screen time and analog time. Screen time and digital information is training wheels. Analog time is working with real people and physical reality. Every analogy is useful for the place where it breaks down. So for certain skills, especially in younger students, the scoot bike is having to deal with real people and unbalanced situations. That’s what I like about making writing real in your approach.