Equiosity

Panda is a miniature horse with an unusual job. She's a guide for her blind owner. We’ve been talking a lot about cues in the recent podcasts. I can think of no better way to illustrate the concepts we’ve been exploring than to talk about Panda’s training and the job she does for her owner, Ann Edie. This is part one of our conversation with Ann. We begin with some history and the contrast between commands and cues.

What is a desperation click? Find out in this week’s conversation.

This week’s episode focuses on antecedents. What are some of the factors that influence the behavior you are seeing? How can you set your learners up for success? Whether you are trying to solve a behavior problem, or you’re teaching a new skill, what comes before offers a lot of fertile ground for behavior change.

In the second half of this conversation we continue with the theme of cues evolve. Cues should evolve because the behaviors they are associated with are also evolving. What does that mean? Is anticipation a problem or is it a good thing? How do we stabilize cues? What is the "What Happens If . . . " game? Find out in this week's episode.

After our recent podcasts with Sarah Owings, Dominique and I had another long conversation about cues. Dominique was particularly interested in some comments I made at the end of the last podcast with Sarah about anticipation and the get ready, get set, go way in which cues evolve. We began by talking about how you can either push against some natural tendencies or learn to use them. An example was transforming grass from what is to us a distraction into a reinforcer that we can use effectively. This led us on to a discussion of rope handling.

We’ve come to the last installment of our conversation with Sarah Owings. In the previous episodes we looked at two different ways of thinking about building cues. In one the handler works hard to remove any body language hints. In the other the handler acknowledges that animals are super observant so she lets the cues evolve out of the shaping process.

We ended the previous episode with this statement: "Our conversation has brought us to a milestone. We have reached this recognition that our animals are communicating to us and we can allow their behavior to modify ours."

So now it’s time to see where these two different models for teaching cues takes us.

Part Three of our conversation with Sarah Owings continues our discussion of cues - how our ideas have changed over time in how we teach them.

This is Part Two of our conversation with Sarah Owings. Sarah is a dog trainer. It may seem odd that in a podcast about all things equine, we are talking about dogs, but there is a lot of value in looking at what people are doing with other species. I learned a long time ago that the way to expand a field is not from within, but by bringing in fresh ideas from outside. So I love going to the Clicker Expo and sitting in on the presentations of other members of the faculty.

Sarah is on the Clicker Expo faculty as well. One of the characteristics all the faculty have in common is we are all life long learners. When we aren’t presenting, we are sitting in on each other’s talks. So this year when I gave my talk on “Cues evolve out of the shaping process” Sarah was sitting in the audience. We chatted afterwards about the presentation but there wasn’t enough time to really have the conversation we both wanted. Not at the Expo. We both had other presentations to get to. But not to worry. It just gave us the perfect excuse to record a podcast together. That has two great advantages. The first is Dominique got to join us for the conversation, and the second is you get to listen in.

So in this week’s episode Sarah describes for us the process she uses for teaching cues. Sarah says at the beginning what she teaches is evolving. To understand what she means by this, we describe the process for teaching cues that we both encountered when we first started to explore clicker training. For both my horses and Sarah’s dogs we very quickly decided this procedure wasn’t for us. It’s interesting to see the convergence of ideas as we work with two very different species. Sarah then describes her current procedure for introducing cues which leads to many more questions.

Sarah Owings joins us for a conversation about cues, but first we begin with a discussion about progressive education and puzzle solving. Before she became a professional dog trainer Sarah taught kindergarten in a progressive school that valued "brave learners". We talk about what that means for both children and our animal learners.

After four weeks listening to our panel discussion on duration, you may think it’s time to move on to another topic. But you would be wrong! The panel discussion prompted a revisiting of one of the strategies we talked about - the 300 Peck Pigeon lesson. We could easily have called this episode “Teaching Better”. Twenty years on from the original development of this lesson, what have we learned? What has changed? The answer is we are loopy!