In the past two years, we’ve made two main changes to our riding program. I wrote about the first big one, moving to sessions-style lesson packages, back in 2023. I was happy to share what was working for us to hopefully improve the financial stability of other riding programs and the hard-working equestrians who run them. 

The second major change that we’ve implemented in our riding program is a tiered system—we call ours the “Ribbon Levels Program”—that clearly scaffolds our mounted and unmounted skills into six levels. Students can’t move on to the next level skills until they’ve mastered the skills in their current level, and students are expected to execute the knowledge learned in previous levels as they progress through the program. 

This isn’t a new idea. Martial arts programs have had a colored belt system in place since the 1800s. Swim schools across the country make you be a really good guppy before you get to be a shark. 

While good riding instructors know what skills they teach in what order, most riding schools rarely have posted curriculum that outlines out for students and parents what skills riders can expect to learn in what order. As most of the families coming through our program have no prior horse experience, this curriculum and tiered system have turned out to be really helpful for parents to understand why, to an untrained eye, their child’s lessons may look similar from week to week, and why it’s so important to truly master a skill before moving on. 

And let’s be real. In so many beginner-level programs, most kids want to do two things: go fast and jump stuff. But Meagan Greygor, our lead instructor, and I both tend to be more cautious, and we refuse to progress our students to any new skills before they’re ready. 

Meagan and I both held clear standards that our students had to meet before, say, they learned to canter (be able to post without stirrups, for example), and we wondered what it might look like if we put those standards into writing. We started chatting about creating a curriculum for our program that more clearly laid out the progression of skills our students could expect to work through. 

What started as simply a bulleted list of what order skills would be taught turned into far more, and has greatly strengthened our program as a whole. 

I’m a high school teacher by day, and in the field of education there’s a teaching method called “backwards design”: the idea that you start with the learning goals in mind and then work backwards. What steps need to occur, or what skills need to be mastered, and in what order, to reach the desired end result?

Meagan and I considered our program, and determined what our highest level of learning could realistically be. We are a small stable north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We do not offer leasing or boarding. The bulk of our students are children, with a few teens, and most take only one lesson a week. Our program just started taking kids to some local schooling shows this past year. We are working on growing our school horse string as several of our most perfect schoolmasters are aging and needing to lighten their loads. 

So with those things in mind, we figured that the most our highest-level students would be able to do is jump a low course, at least for right now. And then we talked about what it would look like for a student to truly master that skill: a rider should be able to ride a course of 18″ to 2′ fences, with correct equitation, accurate striding, and able to identify if they are on the correct lead, changing it with either a simple or flying change if needed. 

So with that as an end goal, we worked backwards. 

We started to list and organize all the riding skills our kids would need to learn to reach to that goal. We discussed the most logical order in which students should progress and sorted and layered skills, realizing that we could break them into six fairly logical, clear groups. We then gave each group of skills a color, choosing to escalate in reverse order of horse show ribbons: green, pink, white, yellow, red, and blue. 

At the green level, we decided, our students would master the walk. Pink became introductory trotting, and white became advanced trotting (hello, diagonals). Riders begin to canter and hop crossrails at the yellow level, and red and blue levels incorporate higher-level jumping skills. 

Once we determined those six overarching levels, we broke down the skills within each in greater detail. And as we often say in teaching, “don’t reinvent the wheel,” and Meagan and I didn’t need to—there were plenty of resources that we used to help detail and explain various skills to our students. Pony Club manuals and the HorseSense Learning Levels curriculum were two of our greatest resources, though we revisited classics like Sally Swift’s “Centered Riding” to help design our materials as well.

For each level, we created a packet of handouts. The front page of each became a bulleted list of skills, and then for of those skills, we created a handout with images and text to explain and clarify that skill. 

Horsemanship has always been a cornerstone of our program, and we decided to incorporate it into our curriculum intentionally as well, so that bulleted list grew to two sections: riding skills and unmounted skills. At the green level, for example, our students have to identify parts of the saddle and bridle, explain why we groom, and demonstrate how to use a curry comb, a brush and a hoof pick. They have to explain the gear they wear to keep them safe astride, and they have to demonstrate how to safely feed a horse a treat. (Our horses love the green level!)

Our unmounted curriculum builds off of itself, as well. To earn their pink ribbons, students have to identify at least 10 horse body parts, demonstrate haltering their horse and leading it safely from its stall, and saddle correctly. To earn white ribbons, they have to be able to safely catch their horse in the pasture, demonstrate their knowledge of equine vital signs and body condition scoring, (and I’m reminded every time a kid works on unmounted white level skills that all of my ponies need to diet). 

Also at the white level, students have to be able to bridle independently. Once a student has earned a white ribbon, they can come to the barn early to groom and tack up for their ride. At green and pink, tacking is part of the lesson, so students are excited about the independence and extra ride time that comes with earning a white ribbon. 

An added bonus to the inclusion of unmounted skills into our curriculum: Unmounted lessons have become normalized and even anticipated in our program! 

While we do have an indoor, most of our students are young, so we used to cancel lessons when winter temps fell below freezing. But now, and especially as both students and parents understand that the unmounted skills and knowledge are necessary for progression, we rarely cancel lessons. If a thunderstorm derails a mounted lesson, or a lesson horse comes in from the field missing a shoe, no one bats an eye when the lesson pivots to practicing wrapping legs with polos or learning the difference between, and purpose of, splint and bell boots.  

Last year, we actually experimented with virtual lessons during occasional heavy snowstorms that made travel to the barn unsafe, and these online lessons were surprisingly well-received. We used them sparingly, but when we had to meet our students online (twice, maybe, all winter) we were met with appreciation rather than complaint. Our avid little equestrians got an hour to talk horses with their instructor, and parents got an hour of peace and quiet!

Today was cold—24 degrees—and one of our teenage students who is working on her red level actually requested an unmounted lesson. She and Megan cozied up in our barn office with hot chocolate and studied how different bits function in a horse’s mouth. An hour later, Megan and another student watched video clips of different horse gaits and flipped through a book of breeds—requirements for the white level that student was working toward. 

Building horsemanship into our equestrian program has always been a passion, and integrating it into our levels curriculum, with buy-in from students and parents, has been virtually seamless. 

So how do kids earn their ribbons? When their instructor and the student agree that the student is successfully demonstrating mastery of all required skills in their lessons, the student is welcome to “test” for that ribbon. They can test during a lesson, or during a designated “Ribbon Test Day” that we hold at the barn about once a quarter. On those ribbon test days, any lesson student is welcome to come and watch other students test. Students enjoy supporting and cheering on friends testing for new levels and newer riders get to see more advanced skills demonstrated by students testing for higher ribbons. 

We bought horse show ribbons printed with the barn logo and the barn name on them, so students who level up earn a physical ribbon, get their picture taken with it, and are recognized on our Facebook page. 

Once a ribbon is earned, the student receives their next-level packet with all of the information they’ll be learning at their next level. When students enter our program, we give them a binder with their green packet inside, so they continue to add packets to their binders as they progress through the program. At the first lesson of a new level, Meagan and I review those new packets with the student, giving them an overview of what’s to come, both on the ground and in the saddle, and students are always excited to learn what’s next. 

Because of the program’s leveled structure, students know exactly what they have to do to move to the next level, and know exactly what they’ll be able to do by the time they earn each ribbon. Parents know exactly what skills their children are working toward. Our students have a solid riding foundation and unmounted horsemanship skills that are lacking in so many young riders, and students and parents value learning those unmounted skills. We don’t have to cancel lessons, as unmounted and even virtual lessons are normalized. And if Meagan or I need to cover the others’ lessons, we know exactly what skills a student is working on simply by knowing the highest color ribbon that student has earned. This structural change has been one of the best things we’ve done for our riding program as a whole.

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Sarah K. Susa is the owner of Black Dog Stables just north of Pittsburgh, where she resides with her husband and young son. She has a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Allegheny College and an M.Ed. from The University of Pennsylvania. She teaches high school English full-time, teaches riding lessons and facilitates educational programs at Black Dog Stables, and has no idea what you mean by the concept of free time.