Are you a Spinner or a Grinder?

Thanks to the good weather that the UK has experienced this summer, I was fortunate to be able to spend a lot of time in the saddle cycling around Scotland.  During these trips I got to considering how I was approaching the many challenges that appeared around almost every bend, namely hills!  In cycling there are two main approaches to climbing a hill – spinning and grinding and, while both have merits, everyone has their own preference.

In layman’s terms, spinning is where the cyclist selects a lower, easier gear and pedals faster, although it can be tiring after a while.  Grinding on the other hand is where a higher gear is chosen, and the cyclists has a slower cadence but has to put more effort into turning the pedals. Many cyclists when they first start are grinders, and stop when tired or the incline is too steep, awhereas most pro cyclists will opt for spinning to keep the cadence (of their pedalling) more consistent.  This year I have been pushing myself to be a spinner rather than trying to prove my manliness by painfully grinding up 20% hills, and this has produced some great results; as in I managed to climb several very steep and long hills without stopping! 

You might be wondering what this has to do with education, but as I was on the biking I had a little bit of an epiphany – grinding and spinning is exactly what we do in the classroom when we are teaching!  

Everyone has heard of the Zones of Proximal Development and scaffolding, but how often do we, as knowledge rich teachers, forget that our students might not have the skills to understand or process the information that we are giving them?  We grind away in the hope that the students will keep with us, and some will, but others, finding it too difficult to will just stop.  This leaves them feeling that they are at fault and that they are not very good in our subject.  

This got me thinking about how I am going to approach my teaching this year.  While I do differentiate, in many of the usual ways, at other points I do feel that I am maybe losing the class as they are finding the work too much of a leap.  This has led me to thinking about how I might refine my teaching mindset; where can I change my approach from that of a grinder just trying to power towards our chosen summit to that of a spinner?  For me, this means taking things in smaller, easier to understand chunks but covering them in shorter (and therefore faster) time frames.  I aim to trial this in my approach to teaching Music Theory – instead of dropping straight into one beat, two beat and half beat notes, I will look at separating these out a little more in a more physical way.

It might seem to be a little bit more work but, as I found out to my relief (and my sporty nephew’s chagrin), spinning can actually be a quicker way to reaching that summit.