Are you making progress?

For those in training classes, there are two people responsible for making sure there's progress.  The instructor and the student.  For those who are working on their own...  there's just one person to monitor progress!  It's important to be objectively monitoring any training process so that we can evaluate improvement. 

If you are seeing progress:

What's the rate of progress?  Can it be improved more? Do we need to set new goals?  What are your plans for maintaining what you've worked towards?

If you are not seeing progress:

• Talk to your instructor.  I am always sad when I have students who are working with other professionals (trainers or vets) but are not seeing progress and have not discussed the lack of progress or additional concerns with that professional.   Utilize the resources available! Get some help.
• Do you need to "break it down" into smaller parts?  Is the training plan not detailed enough?
• Are you focusing on the right challenge?  Example:  When Luna is in class, she will often freeze up and stare at other people or dogs.  If I addressed this as an attention problem...I wouldn't see too much progress.  If I address this as a stressed/afraid dog challenge, we can work to resolve the underlying anxiety and then she will be able to focus on me.  
• Look at the reinforcers:  What are you using? Is it actually reinforcing for your dog? Is there other reinforcement in the picture?  Example:  Young dog barking and pulling on the leash until he's allowed to meet the other dogs he sees during walks.  Now he does a lot of barking and pulling every single time he sees a dog.   The barking was reinforced with play!
• How are you practicing?  Are you doing training exercises to address the challenges at hand?
• How is your management?  Is your training being compromised at other times of day?

Monitoring student progress: 

I make notes about dogs in group classes. The notes include a listing of the goals the family specified and a list of my goals for the dog/family. These are not usually the same!    Each week I can add a few more things to the list or cross of those things we accomplished.  We prioritize based off of the things that impact living with the dog and the human-animal bond.  When students are not seeing progress, we can talk about what's going on. If they aren't working at home....then I'm not too worried. If they are practicing every day, then maybe the dog needs to see a veterinary professional, maybe the team needs a different learning style, or maybe we need to address some of the training skills.   For teams who are complaining yet not practicing, we can talk about why and how we can change things.  Some people learn better through reading. Some are great in class but can't remember a few days later.   

Monitoring our progress: Luna in agility class

About three years ago, I noted that Luna really wasn't making progress in agility class. We were still facing the same challenges we had been working on for over six months (focus, nervous with the teeter, speed).  I decided that we would take some time off to do some training on our own and then we would return to class. It ended up that while we both missed class, it wasn't reinforcing enough for me to head back soon with the hour drive each way and then bathing my dog most weeks (dirt arena.... great to run on. Not great with a longhaired dog!) We've worked on our own and have made improvements with her challenge areas and directly addressed her anxiety with veterinary help.  

Quickly Solving Problems

It's always my goal to quickly address the most pressing issue that a dog owner has, even when in group classes.

Recently we had a less than year old lab mix in a basic class. The challenge was pulling.

Our plan:
Management:  Front clip harness so that the dog couldn't pull as hard. Stopping if the dog pulled to prevent reinforcement from the continued walk. Avoid walks if it was just a bad day, ONLY training walks allowed.  Exercise before walks.

Training: Backwards walking (handler backwards, dog in front, feed for dog being close. I have video clips of this for it's own well-deserved post), walking next to the owner with frequent reinforcement and then less frequent,  the rally call-front exercise (without the sit), leave it working up to using it on the real world, Squirrel game/ systematic distraction training, pace-change exercise (change pace, click for dog matching).   Pivot box.

If you mess up and the dog is pulling:  Plant your feet. Backwards walking. Treat magnet him away.

After 2 weeks of work the dog is great and now we have to come up with other things to work on in class!  Two weeks!   We stopped the reinforcement for pulling. We trained the dog how to walk. And if the dog did start pulling we knew what the best plan was for that point in time.

I wish everything went that fast. Some issues are more challenging. Some owners are less skilled.  Some dogs have had more practice at the undesired behaviors.  But a lot of it comes down to me really needing more efficient plans.    We keep getting better!

A Shaping Class?

Four times this week the topic has come back to training enthusiasts needing to be better at breaking down behaviors into separate components.

Once you've trained a behavior, you often have one (or more) ideas on how to teach it to another dog.  Being able to take a behavior you haven't trained and break it down into the smallest parts is a separate skill.  Those I know who are best at this learned to be proficient through practice. Modifying plans they had been given, taking new behaviors and coming up with plans, and thinking through the many possible options for shaping any given behavior. 

How to teach someone that extra piece of skill is a separate challenge.  I've thought about doing a class or workshop...but most of those  I mentioned are too far away for that to be an option. I've thought about doing an online class....but I don't know if I could get people to commit.  On the to-do list is a website with specific activities for improving shaping.

Students in a pet class typically just need to be given efficient plans, it's the responsibility of the instructor to determine what is likely to be the fastest and most efficient training plan.  In competition classes, it's the same thing. The students want the best plans possible.   It mostly comes down to those who will spend a lot of time working on their own or those who are just training enthusiasts who really want to learn this sort of thing.   In reality, being able to efficiently break things down would allow anyone to do much better problem solving, on their own or in conjunction with a professional. It's much harder to create resources and classes with that angle compared to materials directly for an enthusiast.

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Being able to break down behaviors has been a strong point for me for a very, very long time.  Two events, fairly recently, have allowed me to be even more proficient.

One is TAGteach.  I went to a seminar in 2008 and 2009.  It made me very excited about teaching and training.  And I was/am envious of the TAGTeach vocabulary that we don't have in training.  In TAG Teach there is discussion of the one point of instruction, the "Value Added Tag Point", that improves several aspects at once.  We don't have a word for that in animal training. I've put in more of an effort to find and utilize those in training.  There is a big focus on breaking behaviors down into separate points, that just seems more effective than how things are explained for the same concept in animal training.   

The other event was Morton and Cecilia's presentation at ClickerExpo in 2008. This inspired me to get Griffin. They broke down behaviors into just beautiful little parts. Separate and perfect before putting things together.  A high level of perfection.   But also, the way of breaking down behaviors was far more efficient than what I've typically seen.

Flyball Links and Notes

To better prepare for our flyball training class/time, I've been gathering resource information.

It's interesting how there's not a lot of recently updated flyball information, most of the sites look like they haven't been updated recently. I don't necessarily recommend everything I'm putting here, but I've gotten some information of use from the resources:

- 2 day flyball workshop in Indianapolois in Feb. I'll be at vet conference and there's NO way I'll give up Ken Ramirez for this!
- Videos of training and tournaments. I wish the videos were in youtube or at least just bigger.... but, it's a good collection to see how this group progresses their new dogs.
- A Denver team has a REALLY nice website, it's clean and neat and easy to read and follow. It's good to see how they've laid out their classes and what info they give beginners before attending.
- The massive amount of text on this page makes it hard to read, but this Atlanta group was very kind to post their 'training manual'
- This is a handout, I'm not sure when it was written or who the author is. I have a feeling it is not the most recent handout and some of the technical training pieces are just incorrect. But it may be useful for us to have some sort of handout to give to students who have dogs appropriate for the class?


Griffin is so cute! He ended up crashing the last jump of this, I was probably too much of a distraction, sitting at the end taking photos while someone else was working him!

And that's how I do research. I read and read and read what I can find online, sometimes I order books/DVDs/etc. I watch videos posted online that show the activity (if available). I have a document that I use to save interesting links, there are a bazillion categories.

After I review information, I break down the dog skills and handler skills and prioritize. I look for the most basic small parts of the behavior to build on, and the different ways we can categorize the behaviors. We continually monitor progress (or lack of) and adjust accordingly.

Yesterday I wrote out the basic outline training plan for our flyball training times at PosiDog, and it ended up being a few pages. I'm going to work to condense it to a page of big font for each station and all as one page for everyone who is helping. I also feel like we should have a progress check sheet like I've talked about for other classes to help people know what to work on at home. It's supposed to not be a class but just practice time with helpers available, and so we can answer questions. But last week I ended up helping more than training my dog and that was not a very good thing. We had three beginners to the class (all have had some sort of class experience with it before elsewhere) and had to do some repair training to get proper behaviors and speed.

The goal is to finish up this modification so that I can take the training plan sheets for tomorrow.

(Why do I keep switching from "I" to "we"? Arg!